“You know I am. But I don’t scold you for asking. It’s the more beautiful of you to have quite realized and yet—yet not despise me for all that romantic feeling about some one I’ve never seen.” “Your mother once helped me there.” “My mother! What does she know about—” “More than you might think. When I’d lost patience one day, she told me the only difference between you and other girls was that you were honester and stubborner than most.” “I can hear her saying ‘stubborner.’” “Yes, but it was curious to hear her saying few women, if they remember their youth, can truthfully say it went by without some such—well—she called it names—” “I know one of them. Some such silly ‘infatuation.’” Hildegarde smiled, but not he. “I wonder if my mother ever—Oh, it’s a wild idea!” “I don’t know. She said it was usually either a great soldier or a clergyman, often an actor, sometimes a poet, or ‘even a bachelor statesman.’ And she said that last with such an edge in her voice I wondered at the time what American statesman was still unmarried when Mrs. Mar was in her ’teens.” And their own cloud was dispersed in smiling at another’s. Hildegarde, coming on deck at six o’clock, found sunshine whitening all the thousand tents of Nome. Frame dwellings, too, the eye found out—one standing boldly forth with flag flying. That, Blumpitty said, was the hospital. Was her father there? Courage! Louis was at her side, with confident looks and shining eyes that saw no shadow save the purple splotch in the sea to the left—“Sledge Island.” Had she noticed the snow-seamed hills? She must take his glass and look at that higher lift in the low, undulant line; could she see a queer knob? “_Anvil Rock!_” But the main impression up the beach, and down the beach, and away over the tundra, was tents, tents. And between the _Los Angeles_ and the surf-whitened shore, sails, sails! Ships of every size and kind. Big steamers from Seattle, from San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver, smart sailing vessels, lumbering freight boats, whalers, and among them—darting back and forth like a flock of brown sparrows under the gleaming wings of seagulls—were myriads of little skiffs, dories, lighters, canoes, and here and there a steam launch, bobbing, swarming, surrounding “the last boat in,” and ready to take all and sundry to Nome for dazzling sums. While the more enterprising of the _Los Angeles’_ contingent (swallowing their resentment at the captain’s failure to set them instantly ashore) bargained with the owners of the small craft, a rumor ran about the ship that not even a millionaire might leave till certain formalities had been complied with. But Cheviot had in some way got a special permit to go ashore with one of the officers. While Hildegarde waited after breakfast for his return, she tried to deaden fear of the news he might bring back, listening to the scraps of talk between the touting boatmen and the passengers longingly suspended over the _Los Angeles’_ side.