Hildegarde lifted her head and put up her two hands, feeling in the dark for his. But Mar shrank back. Not from Hildegarde herself could he in that hour take mere sympathy, craving hopelessly as he did with the long thirst of years a thing more precious than pity—the thing that he once had had and had no more. Like a man who utters his own epitaph, “I lost faith myself,” he said. “But I have found it, father!” and there was joy as well as the sound of tears in the thrilling young voice. “Found—what did you say, Hildegarde?” “That I believe the gold’s there, waiting!” “Ah—h—h!” He bent over her with a sound that was almost a sob. “Then I—I believe it, too!” CHAPTER IX Louis Cheviot was one of those who reached the Klondike in the autumn of ’97. A lucky chance brought him the opportunity of going shares in a lay on Bonanza, with a man whose fitness for “pardnership” Cheviot had tested coming over the awful Pass and shooting the Hootalinqua Rapids. The two had washed out ten thousand dollars apiece by the end of June. They had the prospect of making an even better thing of it the next year. Cheviot left his partner to carry on the development of the lease, and for himself, turned his bronzed face homeward. He was as certain now as before he had garnered this experience that for wild life, _qua_ wild life, he had no taste. That it should be so was partly, strange as it may sound, a result of the cool and balanced mixing of the elements in him. He had no physical sluggishness to be sloughed off by harsh impacts, no mental inertia to be hammered into action by hard necessity, no crust of chrysalis that must be broken before the winged life might emerge, no essential wildness of spirit that needed training, no excess of ungoverned ardor that needed cooling in the northern frosts. And so it was that he was coming home with little gain but bullion, since he had gone forth with smaller need than most of the lesson learnt in chastening the body, or the lightening revelation of some crashing danger. He could endure hardship with reasonable patience for some reasonable end, but the gains of civilization were in his eyes too excellent to be even temporarily abandoned without a sense of heavy deprivation, which affected him like a loss of common dignity. Even though he hadn’t one he loved the idea of home. He loved his friends and all the friendlier aspect of the earth, gardens, ordered communities of his kind, and all man’s device for socializing life and regulating the unruliness of nature. And there was Hildegarde—who had not answered either of his two letters. Why was that? He felt a contraction of the heart as he refused to allow himself to formulate surmise; yet if any one had come and said to him, “Galbraith’s in Valdivia,” he would have felt it no surprise.