im men stumbled upon mines,
while other men, more skilful, more observant, failed. The luck was
against them.

It was quite in harmony with his nature that he should be absorbed in
the singular and powerful impulse he had to seek an acquaintance with
that poor dying girl.

Dying! At that word he rebelled. God would not take so beautiful a
creature away from earth; men needed her to teach them gentleness and
submission. More than this, he had an almost uncontrollable impulse to
go to her, and putting aside doctors say to her:

"I am the one to heal you."

He had never had an impulse to heal before, but the fact that it was
unaccountable and powerful and definite, fitted in with his successes.
He gave it careful thought. It must mean something because it had
never come to him before, and because it rose out of the mysterious
depths of his brain.

She must not die! The wind, the mountains, the clear air, the good,
sweet water, the fragrant pines, the splendid sun--these things must
help her. "And I, perhaps I, too, can help her?"

Back in the glare of the hotel rotunda, with its rows of bored men
sitting stolidly smoking, idly talking, his impulse and his resolution
seemed very unmanly and preposterous. It is so easy to lose faith in
the elemental in the midst of the superficial and ephemeral of daily
habit.

CHAPTER II

Clement was an early riser, and, notwithstanding his restless night,
was astir at six. The whole world had changed for him. It was no
longer a question of ore and amalgams, it was a question of when he
should see again that sad, slender woman with the hopeless smile.

He had now a great fear that she would not be able to come down to
breakfast at all, but as her coming was his only hope of seeing her he
clung to it. Eight o'clock seemed to him to be the latest hour that
any one not absolutely bedridden would think of breakfasting, and at
four minutes past the hour he entered the dining-room.

The negro waiter tried to seat him near the door, but he pushed on
down the hall toward a little group near one of the sunny windows,
which he took to be the sick girl and her father, and so it proved.

His seat at a table next to theirs brought her profile between him
and the window, and the light around her head seemed to glorify her
till she shone like a figure in a church window. She seemed not
concerned with earth. He was more deeply moved than ever before in his
life, but he concealed it--