‘Aug. 29th.—Leidley made a wooden caisson and sunk it about 250 ft. beyond low tide, and got from fifteen to fifty cents per shovel. I did not see this experiment, but I believe firmly that the richest part of the beach is beyond low tide. ‘There will be more money come out from Nome than came from the Klondike.’” “Here’s a column headed— “‘A REGION RICHER THAN PIPE-DREAMS “‘Nome defies all theories and every precedent. Its greatest mines have been found, and its greatest fortunes have been made by men who knew nothing of mining. Gold has been discovered by lawyers and doctors, dry-goods’ clerks, plow-boys, barbers, fiddlers and politicians, in a thousand places where old miners would have sworn, and did swear, it was impossible. Millions of dollars in glittering dust and nuggets have been thawed out of frozen rubble and moss, and washed from ocean beaches and other unheard-of depositories by young divinity students, country printers, piano professors and didapper dandies, whom nobody ever suspected of knowing grindstones from thousand-dollar quartz, or iron pyrites from free gold.’” Mrs. Mar read on, intoxicating herself. “Here’s a woman who was up there in the summer when the beach gold was found. She’s brought home $15,000, and a claim she refused to take $38,000 for.” But if there was anything about typhoid in the paper Hildegarde had to find it out for herself. Little by little she knew that however deterred her mother had been by Cheviot’s onslaught the spring before, she was either consciously or unconsciously coming to look favorably on Hildegarde’s old plan. What the inexperience of the girl could not guess was that Mr. Mar’s absence had taught his wife several things. And that lady had no inclination to gather another year’s harvest of the bitter fruit. If Hildegarde could get him to come home, Hildegarde ought to be supported in spite of Cheviot and the boys. But real confidence between them was so little easy, that the girl said nothing to her mother of her plan to raise money by selling the beautiful necklace and the other things that Bella had from time to time brought home to her from abroad. Hildegarde would go to a man she could trust—“the family jeweler,” as they called the individual whose high office had been to restore the pins to brooches that Mrs. Mar’s energetic fingers had wrenched off, and to mend Mr. Mar’s grandfather’s watch-chain when it broke, as it used, two or three times every year. To the family jeweler, then, Hildegarde took her box of treasures. “What are they worth?” The little man screwed a glass in his eye, and examined rare stones and renaissance enamel with an omniscient air. “I know you’ll do your best for me,” Hildegarde said anxiously. “Of course—certainly, Miss Mar. Not very new, are they?” “New! Oh, no—they’re so old they’re very valuable.” “Yes. H’m. Yes.”