usiness I want to talk over with _you_, Di."

She had always been a young woman of rather a hard finish. Now she met
him fairly, eye to eye. "Any time you like, Gordon."

Elliot carried away with him one very definite impression. Diane
intended Sheba to marry Macdonald if she could bring it about. She had
as good as served notice on him that the girl was spoken for.

The young man set his square jaw. Diane was used to having her own way.
So was Macdonald. Well, the Elliots had a will of their own too.

CHAPTER XII

SHEBA SAYS "PERHAPS"

Obeying the orders of the general in command, Peter took himself to
his den with the excuse that he had blue-prints to work over. Presently
Diane said she thought she heard one of the children crying and left
to investigate.

The Scotchman strode to the fireplace and stood looking down into the
glowing coals. He seemed in no hurry to break the silence and Sheba
glanced at his strong, brooding face a little apprehensively. Her
excitement showed in the color that was beating into her cheeks. She
knew of only one subject that would call for so formal a private talk
between her and Macdonald, and any discussion of this she would very
much have liked to postpone.

He turned from the fire to Sheba. It was characteristic of him that he
plunged straight at what he wanted to say.

"I've asked to see you alone, Miss O'Neill, because I want to make a
confession and restitution--to begin with," he told her abruptly.

She had a sense of suddenly stilled pulses. "That sounds very serious."
The young woman smiled faintly.

His face of chiseled granite masked all emotion. It kept under lock and
key the insurgent impulses that moved him when he looked into the sloe
eyes charged with reserve. Back of them, he felt, was the mystery of
purity, of maidenhood. He longed to know her better, to find out and
to appropriate for himself the woman that lay behind the fine veil of
flesh. She seemed to him delicate as a flame and as vivid. There would
come a day when her innocent, passional nature would respond to the love
of a man as a waiting harp does to skillful fingers.

"My story goes away back to the Klondike days. I told you that I knew
your father on Frenchman Creek, but I didn't say much about knowing him
on Bonanza."

"Mr. Strong has told me something about the days on Bonanza, and I knew
you would tell me more some day--when you wanted to speak about it." She
was seated in a low ch