and have
tolerably good accounts of you. Come West with me and spend the week
end at my house, where we could talk things over quietly."

Geoffrey was gratified--for the speaker was famous in his
profession--and he showed his feeling as he answered: "I consider
myself fortunate that you should ask me."

"I figured you were not fond of compliments, and I'm a plain man
myself," declared Savine, with the humor apparent in his keen eyes
again. "I will, however, give you one piece of advice before I forget
it. My sister-in-law might be there, and if she wants to doctor you,
don't let her. She has a weakness for physicking strangers, and the
results are occasionally embarrassing."

It happened accordingly that Thurston, who had overhauled his wardrobe
in Vancouver, duly arrived at a pretty wooden villa which looked down
upon a deep inlet. He knew the mountain valleys of the Cumberland, and
had wandered, sometimes footsore and hungry, under the giant ramparts
of the Selkirks and the Rockies, but he had never seen a fairer spot
than the reft in the hills which sheltered Savine's villa, and was
known by its Indian name, "The Place of the Hundred Springs."

For a background somber cedars lifted their fretted spires against the
skyline on the southern hand. Beneath the trees the hillsides closed
in and the emerald green of maples and tawny tufts of oak rolled down
to a breadth of milk-white pebbles and a stretch of silver sand, past
which clear green water shoaling from shade to shade wound inland.
Threads of glancing spray quivered in and out among the foliage, and
high above, beyond a strip of sparkling sea and set apart by filmy
cloud from all the earth below, stretched the giant saw-edge of the
Coast Range's snow.

The white-painted, red-roofed dwelling, with its green-latticed
shutters, tasteful scroll work and ample, if indifferently swarded,
lawns, was pleasant to look upon, but Thurston found more pleasure in
the sight of its young mistress, who awaited him in a great cool room
that was hung with deer-head trophies and floored with parquetry of
native timber.

Helen Savine wore a white dress and her favorite crimson roses nestled
in the belt. Though she greeted Geoffrey with indifferent cordiality,
the girl was surprised when her eyes rested upon him. Thurston was not
a man of the conventional type one meets and straightway forgets, and
she had often thought about him; but, since the night at Crosbie Ghyll,