“Too certain of me—yes, you are. I’ve been uncommon helpless in the matter. I’ve got nothing of the actor in me. I can’t be near you, and inspire you with the smallest doubt as to how things are with me. The one thing I can do is _not_ to be near. And that’s what I’m going to do.” She wrinkled up her white forehead with a harassed attempt to keep her wits about her, and not be betrayed into rash professions. “You can go away from Valdivia for a while, if that idea is so attractive, without going to the horrible Klondike.” “Yes, I could go to Pasadena or some seaside resort, so that I could come running back, as I did last year from Monterey, on the first hint that you might be missing me a little. No, all that’s been tried. It doesn’t work. I must go to some place where I _can’t_ take the first train back; where I won’t live through the day expecting a letter from you. It isn’t easy in these times for anybody to be really ‘out of reach.’ When we all know that we’ve only to go to the nearest telegraph office for news, we can’t know what it would be like utterly to lose some one—unless death teaches us. The nearest approach to the sort of thing I mean—this side of Kingdom Come—is the Klondike.” “Oh, Klondike, Klondike! I’m sick of the very sound of those two syllables. There’s something uncanny about them. People have gone mad since they heard the ugly word, but not you!”—to give her words more than common emphasis, to insure winning the day, she laid her hand on his arm, and said again, with soft deliberation—“Not you, Louis.” “You’d like me to stay here and suffer. Yes, I know that.” Her hand dropped from his sleeve. “But I shan’t stay here,” he went on unmoved, “and pretty soon I shan’t suffer—so much.” From that old, recurrent touch of hardness in his voice and air, she once again recoiled. “Well, I’ve said all I mean to say. You must please yourself.” “Pleasure is of course what one expects in the Klondike.” They walked in absolute silence back to the porch. Hildegarde went in at once, saying “good-night” over her shoulder, and quite sure that as usual he would follow her. But he stayed behind for fully twenty minutes, talking with Mr. Mar, who was smoking out there in the dusk. Hildegarde turned up the electric light in the parlor, and moved about the room, picking up and putting down one book after another. How many of them he had given her—that provoking person who stayed so long talking to her father! By and by she heard her own name called. Was that her father? How curious his voice sounded! “Yes,” she answered, but made no great haste. When at last she reached her father’s side, she couldn’t see where Cheviot was. She looked round in the dim light, and a little sharply, “Has he gone?” she said. As the words fell on the quiet air, she heard the gate shut. The sound jarred. It gave her a sensation as of a being abandoned. The house was very quiet to-night.