always a fighting chance. It was only
death that was final.

Elizabeth went to the station to see him off, a small slim thing in
a black frock, with eyes that persistently sought his face, and a
determined smile. He pulled her arm through his, so he might hold her
hand, and when he found that she was wearing her ring he drew her even
closer, with a wave of passionate possession.

"You are mine. My little girl."

"I am yours. For ever and ever."

But they assumed a certain lightness after that, each to cheer the
other. As when she asserted that she was sure she would always know the
moment he stopped thinking about her, and he stopped, with any number of
people about, and said:

"That's simply terrible! Suppose, when we are married, my mind turns on
such a mundane thing as beefsteak and onions? Will you simply walk out
on me?"

He stood on the lowest step of the train until her figure was lost in
the darkness, and the porter expostulated. He was, that night, a little
drunk with love, and he did not read the note she had thrust into his
hand at the last moment until he was safely in his berth, his long
figure stretched diagonally to find the length it needed.

"Darling, darling Dick," she had written. "I wonder so often how you can
care for me, or what I have done to deserve you. And I cannot write how
I feel, just as I cannot say it. But, Dick dear, I have such a terrible
fear of losing you, and you are my life now. You will be careful and not
run any risks, won't you? And just remember this always. Wherever you
are and wherever I am, I am thinking of you and waiting for you."

He read it three times, until he knew it by heart, and he slept with it
in the pocket of his pajama coat.

Three days later he reached Norada, and registered at the Commercial
Hotel. The town itself conveyed nothing to him. He found it totally
unfamiliar, and for its part the town passed him by without a glance.
A new field had come in, twenty miles from the old one, and had brought
with it a fresh influx of prospectors, riggers, and lease buyers. The
hotel was crowded.

That was his first disappointment. He had been nursing the hope that
surroundings which he must once have known well would assist him in
finding himself. That was the theory, he knew. He stood at the window of
his hotel room, with its angular furniture and the Gideon Bible, and for
the first time he realized the difficulty of what he had set out to do.
Had he been abl