"You have prospected all over the ridge?" continued the woman, impatiently. "All over!" "And you don't find anything?" "Nothin'," said Gabriel. "Nary. Thet is," he added with his usual cautious deliberation, "thet is, nothin' o' any account. The gold, ef there is any, lies lower down in the gulch, whar I used to dig. But I kept at it jest to satisfy your whim. You know, July, it _was_ a whim of yours," he continued, with a certain gentle deprecatoriness of manner. A terrible thought flashed suddenly upon Mrs. Conroy. Could Dr. Devarges have made a mistake? Might he not have been delirious or insane when he wrote of the treasure? Or had the Secretary deceived her as to its location? A swift and sickening sense that all she had gained, or was to gain, from her scheme, was the man before her--and that _he_ did not love her as other men had--asserted itself through her trembling consciousness. Mrs. Conroy had already begun to fear that she loved this husband, and it was with a new sense of yearning and dependence that she in her turn looked deprecatingly and submissively into his face and said-- "It _was_ only a whim, dear--I dare say a foolish one. It's gone now. Don't mind it!" "I don't," said Gabriel, simply. Mrs. Conroy winced. "I thought you looked disappointed," she said after a pause. "It ain't that I was thinkin' on, July; it's Olly," said Gabriel. There is a limit even to a frightened woman's submission. "Of course," she said, sharply; "Olly, Olly again and always. I ought to have remembered that." "Thet's so," said Gabriel with the same exasperating quiet. "I was reckonin' jest now, ez there don't seem to be any likeliness of you and Olly's gettin' on together, you'd better separate. Thar ain't no sense goin' on this way, July--no sense et all. And the worst o' the hull thing ez thet Olly ain't gettin' no kinder good outer it, no way!" Mrs. Conroy was very pale and dangerously quiet as Mr. Conroy went on. "I've allers allowed to send that child to school, but she don't keer to go. She's thet foolish, thet Olly is, thet she doesn't like to leave me, and I reckon I'm thet foolish too thet I don't like to hev her go. The only way to put things square ez this"---- Mrs. Conroy turned and fixed her grey eyes upon her husband, but she did not speak. "You'd better go away," continued Gabriel, quietly, "for a while. I've heerd afore now that it's the reg'lar thing fur a bride to go away and visit her mother. You hain't got no mother," said Gabriel thoughtfully, "hev ye?--that's bad. But you was a sayin' the other day suthin' about some business you had down at 'Frisco. Now it would be about the nateral sort o' thing for ye to go thar fur two or three months, jest till things get round square with Olly and me."