etorted. "I have certain important arrangements to
make that must not be needlessly delayed."

"I can understand that, Mrs. Jones."

"Then tell me frankly, how long have I to live?"

"Perhaps a month; possibly less; but----"

"You are not honest with me, Doctor Anstruther! What I wish to know--
what I _must_ know--is how soon this disease will be able to kill me.
If we manage to defer the end somewhat, all the better; but the fiend
must not take me unaware, before I am ready to resign my life."

He seated himself beside the bed and reflected. This was his most
interesting patient; he had attended her constantly for more than a
year and in this time had learned to admire not only her beauty of
person but her "gameness" and wholesome mentality. He knew something of
her past life and history, too, as well from her own lips as from
common gossip, for this was no ordinary woman and her achievements were
familiar to many.

She was the daughter of Captain Bob Seaver, whose remarkable career was
known to every man in the West. Captain Bob was one "forty-niners" and
had made fortunes and lost them with marvelous regularity. He had a
faculty for finding gold, but his speculations were invariably unwise,
so his constant transitions from affluence to poverty, and vice versa,
were the subject of many amusing tales, many no doubt grossly
exaggerated. And the last venture of Captain Bob Seaver, before he
died, was to buy the discredited "Ten-Spot" mine and start to develop
it.

At that time he was a widower with one motherless child--Antoinette--a
girl of eighteen who had been reared partly in mining camps and partly
at exclusive girls' schools in the East, according to her father's
varying fortunes. "Tony" Seaver, as she was generally called in those
days, combined culture and refinement with a thorough knowledge of
mining, and when her father passed away and left her absolute mistress
of the tantalizing "Ten-Spot," she set to work to make the mine a
success, directing her men in person and displaying such shrewd
judgment and intelligence, coupled with kindly consideration for her
assistants, that she became the idol of the miners, all of whom were
proud to be known as employees of Tony Seaver's "Ten-Spot" would have
died for their beautiful employer if need be.

And the "Ten-Spot" made good. In five years Tony had garnered a million
or two of well-earned dollars, and then she sold out and retired from
business. Also, to th