When Cheviot had gone, “What’s the news?” said Mar. “Oh, they’re all well, and the boys are getting on splendidly. Mother sends you—” “Nothing yet from Jack Galbraith?” “Nothing, up to the day I left. Father, it bores Louis dreadfully, hearing about—arctic exploration. We won’t talk about Jack Galbraith before Louis. But I’ve often thought, while I’m crawling up this side of the round world, Jack is probably sliding down the other.” “It’s one of the reasons for going home,” said the old man, thinking aloud. CHAPTER XXIII It was after some delay through fogs that, on a clear July morning to Hildegarde for ever memorable, the small whaling vessel _Beluga_ anchored below the cape called Prince of Wales, that looks across the narrow Strait of Bering to the Siberian shore. The girl, with her new friend Reddy at her side, overheard with inattentive ear her father’s final instructions. Mar, whose difficulty in getting about was obviously increased in these months of absence, had agreed to remain on board. Cheviot’s the task of making the most of the brief span granted by the surly captain for inquiry into the condition of the gold camp two miles across the surf, and two more inland up Polaris Creek. But if the talk between the men about possible claim-jumpers, treatment of “tailings,” increase of water-power, double shifts, and clean-ups—if such matters held but a modified interest for the girl on this golden morning, not so the scene itself. Even in the gray light of yesterday, when, toward bedtime, the thicker fog-veils lifted enough to show how far the _Beluga_ had gone out of her course, the girl had thrilled at the misty vision of the Diomede Islands. For one of these showed the fringe of Asia. Hildegarde had reached that place in her journeying where the East was become the West, and where to find the farthest limit of the immemorial Orient you must needs look toward the setting sun. To-day, coming on deck before she broke her fast, something in the girl had cried out greeting at her first glimpse of the coast-line bluffs of extreme northwestern Alaska, drawn in purple against a radiant east, to the south receding a little from the shore and fainting into the blue of snow-flecked hills having a strip of tundra at their feet. There, upon that narrow coastwise margin, directly in front of what from the deck of the _Beluga_ seemed the highest point in the background, the sunshine picked out boldly the intense white of the handful of tents that stood for the settlement of Polaris and the port for the Polaris mining-camp.