While Elliot was brushing his dinner coat before the open window of the
room assigned him at the hotel, somebody came out to the porch below.
The voice of a woman floated faintly to him.

"Seen Diane's Irish beauty yet, Ned?"

"Yes," a man answered.

The woman laughed softly. "Mrs. Mallory came up on the same boat with
her." The inflection suggested that the words were meant not to tell a
fact, but some less obvious inference.

"Oh, you women!" the man commented good-naturedly.

"She's wonderfully pretty, and of course Diane will make the most of
her. But Mrs. Mallory is a woman among ten thousand."

"I'd choose the girl if it were me," said the man.

"But it isn't you. We'll see what we'll see."

They were moving up the street and Gordon heard no more. What he had
heard was not clear to him. Why should any importance attach to the fact
that Mrs. Mallory and Sheba O'Neill had come up the river on the same
boat? Yet he was vaguely disturbed by the insinuation that in some way
Diane was entering her cousin as a rival of the older woman. He resented
the idea that the fine, young personality of the Irish girl was being
cheapened by management on the part of Diane Paget.

Elliot was not the only dinner guest at the Paget home that evening. He
found Colby Macdonald sitting in the living-room with Sheba. She came
quickly forward to meet the newly arrived guest.

"Mr. Macdonald has been telling me about my father. He knew him on
Frenchman Creek where they both worked claims," explained the girl.

The big mining man made no comment and added nothing to what she said.
There were times when his face was about as expressive as a stone wall.
Except for a hard wariness in the eyes it told nothing now.

The dinner went off very well. Diane and Peter had a great many
questions to ask Gordon about old friends. By the time these had been
answered Macdonald was chatting easily with Sheba. The man had been in
many out-of-the-way corners of the world, had taken part in much that
was dramatic and interesting. If the experience of the Irish girl had
been small, her imagination had none the less gone questing beyond the
narrow bars of her life upon amazing adventure. She listened with
glowing eyes to the strange tales this man of magnificent horizons had
to tell. Never before had she come into contact with any one like him.

The others too succumbed to his charm. He dominated that little
dining-room because he was a sixty-horse-p