“You did what you were bound to do, I guess, when you met a man that could throw a lariat round the neck of that romantic imagination of yours. Right? I don’t know. I guess I’ve got the same old streak of Puritan Americanism in me, although if other people want to have _liaisons_ and divorces it’s none of my affair. Women will do more and more as they damn please, I guess, men having set them such a good example for a few centuries. But I simply hate the idea of losing you. I want you right here in Butte. Lord, I’ve almost forgotten may slang!” Ora laughed with something like her old merriment. “Oh, you’ll have me for an escape valve for a while yet. Valdobia’s mother is dying of some lingering horrible disease. It wouldn’t be decent for me to go to Rome, and I should be lonely anywhere else. So, I’ve made up my mind to stay here during the summer at least, and realise a dream I used to indulge in before I ever knew I could fall in love.” Once more she looked straight at Ida, this time with the slow expectant smile of a child. “I’m going to reopen my mine and run it myself--of course I shall have a manager. Mark has written, or telegraphed, to Mr. Compton to find one for me--but I shall live out there and go down every day, and make believe I am doing something, too--at all events realise that it _is_ my mine. Mining has always--that is, always did fascinate me more than anything else on earth. I shall be devoted to Valdobia when I am married to him, but I simply must have that adventure first----” “For heaven’s sake don’t go dotty like Gregory over a hole in the ground. If you get that bee buzzing round in your skull I pity poor Valdobia. If it were not for his mother I’d cable to him to come out----” Ora’s face set with a hardness that arrested Ida’s observant eye. “Don’t you do anything of the sort. Mark said once about my father, ‘It was characteristic of him that when he quit he quit for good.’ I am always discovering more and more of my father in me. I’ll live that old dream and it will finish when Valdobia and I both are free. Then I shall wipe it off the slate--consign it to limbo.” She sprang to her feet and stretched out her arms. “I am going to do exactly as I please as long as I am free. Of course I am mad about Valdobia--you know that I wouldn’t marry him if I were not--but I am mad too about liberty and my mine. This is my only chance. And I am a Montanan, born in the Rocky Mountains. I want something of the life that has made my state famous before I become a European. I’ve never had anything of her but Butte. I want the wild mountains--I want, above all, the mine that has given me my freedom. I’m going to wear overalls and go down into the mine every day.”