All night long the Rosemary, drawn by the sturdiest of mountain-climbing locomotives, had stormed onward and upward from the valley of the Grand, through black defiles and around the shrugged shoulders of the mighty peaks to find a resting-place in the white-robed dawn on the siding at Argentine. The lightest of sleepers, Virginia had awakened when the special was passing through Carbonate; and, drawing the berth curtain, she had lain for an hour watching the solemn procession of cliffs and peaks wheeling in stately and orderly array against the inky background of sky. Now, in the steel-blue dawn, she was--or thought she was--the first member of the party to dress and steal out upon the railed platform to look abroad upon the wondrous scene in the canyon. But her reverie, trance-like in its wordless enthusiasm, was presently broken by a voice behind her--the voice, namely, of Mr. Arthur Jastrow. “What a howling wilderness, to be sure, isn't it?” said the secretary, twirling his eyeglasses by the cord and looking, as he felt, interminably bored. “No, indeed; anything but that,” she retorted warmly. “It is grander than anything I ever imagined. I wish there were a piano in the car. It makes me fairly ache to set it in some form of expression, and music is the only form I know.” “I'm glad if it doesn't bore you,” he rejoined, willing to agree with her for the sake of prolonging the interview. “But to me it is nothing more than a dreary wilderness, as I say; a barren, rock-ribbed gulch affording an indifferent right of way for two railroads.” “For one,” she corrected, in a quick upflash of loyalty for her kin. The secretary shifted his gaze from the mountains to the maiden and smiled. She was exceedingly good to look upon--high-bred, queenly, and just now the fine fire of enthusiasm quickened her pulses and sent the rare flush to neck and cheek. Jastrow the cold-eyed, the business automaton, set to go off with a click at Mr. Somerville Darrah's touch, had ambitions not automatic. Some day he meant to put the world of business under foot as a conqueror, standing triumphant on the apex of that pyramid of success which the Mr. Somerville Darrahs were so painstakingly uprearing. When that day should come, there would need to be an establishment, a menage, a queen for the kingdom of success. Summing her up for the hundredth time since the beginning of the westward flight, he thought Miss Carteret would fill the requirements passing well. But this was a divagation, and he pulled himself back to the askings of the moment, agreeing with her again without reference to his private convictions. “For one, I should have said,” he amended. “We mean to have it that way, though an unprejudiced onlooker might be foolish enough to say that there is a pretty good present prospect of two.”