patronizingly admit. There was no sense of degradation in accepting the
friendship of this man who had traveled so far, seen so much, and yet,
as a practical man of the world, Rand felt was so inferior to himself.
The absence of Miss Euphemia, who had early left the mountain, was a
source of odd, half-definite relief. Indeed, when he closed his eyes to
rest that night, it was with a sense that the reality of his situation
was not as bad as he had feared. Once only, the figure of his
brother--haggard, weary, and footsore, on his hopeless quest, wandering
in lonely trails and lonelier settlements--came across his fancy; but
with it came the greater fear of his return, and the pathetic figure was
banished. "And, besides, he's in Sacramento by this time, and like
as not forgotten us all," he muttered; and, twining this poppy and
mandragora around his pillow, he fell asleep.

His spirits had quite returned the next morning, and once or twice he
found himself singing while at work in the shaft. The fear that Ruth
might return to the mountain before he could get rid of Mornie, and
the slight anxiety that had grown upon him to know something of his
brother's movements, and to be able to govern them as he wished, caused
him to hit upon the plan of constructing an ingenious advertisement to
be published in the San Francisco journals, wherein the missing Ruth
should be advised that news of his quest should be communicated to him
by "a friend," through the same medium, after an interval of two weeks.
Full of this amiable intention, he returned to the surface to dinner.
Here, to his momentary confusion, he met Miss Euphemia, who, in absence
of Sol, was assisting Mrs. Sol in the details of the household.

If the honest frankness with which that young lady greeted him was not
enough to relieve his embarrassment, he would have forgotten it in
the utterly new and changed aspect she presented. Her extravagant
walking-costume of the previous day was replaced by some bright calico,
a little white apron, and a broad-brimmed straw-hat, which seemed to
Rand, in some odd fashion, to restore her original girlish simplicity.
The change was certainly not unbecoming to her. If her waist was not
as tightly pinched, a la mode, there still was an honest, youthful
plumpness about it; her step was freer for the absence of her high-heel
boots; and even the hand she extended to Rand, if not quite so small as
in her tight gloves, and a little brown from