"Very well. You are now chief engineer, or anything else you please, at a chief engineer's salary. You are to go to work at once digging the new ventilating and pumping shaft. You are to proceed at once to install your other improvements, and, when you report to me that there is no longer any use for the mules in the mine, I'll bring them all out and sell them. I'll look to the payments incidental to your work. My mission here is to make this mine a paying property. To that end, you are to bear in mind, I have an entirely free hand, and all the money needed is at my command. Now let that finish business for to-night. I want you to spend the rest of the dark hours in telling me your story and Mary's. I want to know all that has happened to both of you since--well, since she told me she loved you and not--me. You don't mind sitting up for the rest of the night?" "Certainly not. I've sat up with you on far smaller provocation." "But how about Mary?" "She will sleep, or, if she doesn't--and I suppose she won't--she is entirely happy. She will be glad to have me spend the night with you." "Very well, then. Tell me the story of what has happened to you and Mary since the day when we quarreled like a pair of idiots, and--like men of sense--decided not to fight. I want to hear it all." "I'll tell it all," said the other. And he did. XIX DICK TEMPLE'S STORY This is the story that Richard Temple told to his friend in the small hours of that night's morning. Let us dispense with quotation marks to cover it. You know what my education was. My uncle, whose heir I was supposed to be, spared no expense to equip me for my life's work. He sent me to the best schools in the North, and afterwards to the best schools in Europe. Just at the beginning of the war, and because of it, I returned to Virginia. I secured a commission in the engineer corps, but I soon resigned it, because at the beginning of the war there was no earnest work for the engineer corps to do, and I foolishly thought there never would be. I enlisted as a private in the artillery, and before the end of the war I was a captain. A few months before the war ended, I married Mary. You, of course, understand. Mary was the daughter of an ancient and honorable house, but she was living as a dependent in the family of a very remote relative--so remote that the kinship was rather mythical than real. At that time I owned, or was supposed to own, my ancestral plantation, Robinet. My uncle at his death had left it to me. As a man abundantly able to provide for a wife, I asked Mary to marry me, and to become the mistress of Robinet. We were married about the time Fort Harrison fell into the enemy's hands. I remember that I had to delay the wedding in order to bombard Fort Harrison with my mortars, in preparation for the infantry assault, which it was hoped might recover the works.