r."

As they were returning to the office they met the young driver of the
mule-train, and Viola introduced him as "Mr. Ward, of Boston."

He was tall and spare, with a fine, sensitive, boyish face--a face of
refinement which his rough, gray shirt, faded leggings, and badly
battered hat belied.

"Mr. Ward is out here for his health, also," Viola explained. "All the
really nice people are 'one-lungers.'"

"Isn't it sad?" said Ward, gravely. "However, Miss Lambert is only
partly right. I made my health an excuse. I'm here because I like it."

Serviss bent a keen look upon him. "You don't look as if you had ever
been sick."

"I'm not. I came out here to escape college--and my father's
business." He laughed. "But don't betray me. I'm supposed to be
'slowly improving.'"

There was something fine and hawklike in the young fellow's profile as
he stood negligently leaning on the door-frame, his eyes on the
flushed face of the girl; and Serviss experienced another pang of
jealous pain--they were so young, so comely, so full of the fire and
imagination of youth. At the moment his own fame and special tasks
were of small account.

Upon their return to the office Lambert met them in the same
absent-minded, apologetic way. "I'm just getting some new machinery
into place and haven't a minute, but you must make yourself as much at
home as you can. Viola will show you around."

Serviss protested that he needed no entertainment, that he was not
tired, and that he was well content to sit in the door and smoke and
watch the changing glory of the peaks, and this he did while Viola
moved about among the workmen in earnest conversation with her
step-father.

"She is explaining me," Serviss reasoned. "I wish I could hear what
she says. It would be amusing to know myself as she sees me. I hope
she doesn't think me middle-aged as well as wise."

Lambert listened to his daughter's words with attention, for a
professor in a college was an exalted person in his eyes, and one of
his chief regrets at the moment was that he was unable to say to
Serviss, "I am a college man myself"; but this he could not do for the
reason that the death of his father had taken him out of his class at
the beginning of his third year, and put him at the head of a large
family as its breadwinner.

"He looks like a very young man, almost a boy--too young to be a
professor; but then"--here his eyes twinkled--"when I was at Jefferson
all professors seemed o