"Yes, any message you are moved to send."

"Tell her that Guilford Duncan has appointed you sole engineer of these
mines, with full salary, and that if you succeed in the task you have
undertaken, a far better salary awaits you."

Temple hesitated a moment and at last resumed his seat before answering.
Then he said:

"This is very generous of you. I will go to her now, and deliver your
message. She will be very glad. She was in doubt as to how you would
receive me. But may I come back? Late as it is, I have a good deal more
to say to you--about the mine, of course. You and I used often to talk
all night, in the old days, long ago, before--well before we quarreled."

"Go!" answered Duncan with emotion. "Go! Tell Mary what I have said.
Then come back. One night's sleep, more or less, doesn't matter much to
healthy men like you and me."

XVIII

DICK TEMPLE'S PLANS

When Richard Temple returned to the office of the mining company, his
always cheerful face was rippling with a certain look of gladness that
told its own story of love and devotion. Had he not borne good tidings
to Mary? Had he not, for the first time in months, been able to stand
before her in another character than that of a working miner, and to
offer her some better promise of the future than she had known before?

Not that Mary ever thought of her position as one unworthy of her
womanhood, not that she had ever in her innermost heart allowed herself
to lament the poverty she shared with him, or to reproach him with the
obscurity into which her life with him had brought her. Richard Temple
knew perfectly that no shadow of disloyalty had ever fallen upon Mary
Temple's soul. He knew her for a wife of perfect type who, having
married him "for better or for worse," had only rejoicing in her loving
heart that she had been able to accept the "worse" when it came, to make
the "better" of it, and to help him with her devotion at a time when he
had most sorely needed help.

He knew that his Mary was not only content, but happy in the miner's hut
which had been her only home since her marriage, and which, with loving
hands, she had glorified into something better to the soul than any
palace is where love is not.

O, good women! All of you! How shall men celebrate enough your devotion,
your helpfulness, your loyalty, and your love? How shall men ever repay
the debt they owe to wifehood and motherhood? How shall civilization
itself sufficiently ho