“I’ve told her all that. But--well--you don’t know Ora. Gambling--taking long chances--is in her blood, I guess. You should have seen her at Monte Carlo. You must take in Mrs. Cameron, but I am putting Ora on your left as it is time you two got acquainted. Try to dissuade her. I want her to stay here with me.” “I’ll do my best. How are you getting on? Butte still panning out?” “I adore Butte and find nothing to change. It’s too wonderful--to have all your old dreams come true like this! I hope your mine is behaving. I heard a rumour the other day that you had lost your vein----” “Just found it again!” Ida noted the exultant ring of his voice, and was about to laugh when she changed her tactics swiftly. “Good! I know just how fine you feel--and that it wasn’t the loss of money that worried you either. Well, the dinner will be a sort of celebration. Good-bye.” “Good-bye.” There was a faint accent of surprise in Gregory’s voice. Ida smiled and returned to her interrupted toilette. “Just let me get a good chance at him once more,” she thought. “I’ll be eating copper before I get through, but I don’t know him or his sex if he won’t be nibbling off the same chunk.” VII The next week was the busiest she had ever known. All the people that had called on her called again on Ora. Her cook collapsed when told to prepare a dinner for twenty-eight people, and Ida, who would not hearken to a public caterer and his too familiar idiosyncrasies, telegraphed to St. Paul for a chef. What moments she had to spare after consultations with this autocrat, with a temperamental designer of menu cards, and with two high-handed young women whom she had been persuaded by the charitable Mrs. Cameron to engage to decorate her rooms, were spent with certain works on copper and mining that she had procured from the public library. She looked forward to the evening of her dinner party with a secret excitement that seemed to fork its lightning into every recess of her brain, and electrify it with a sense of the fulness of life--that hinted intoxicatingly of life’s perfections. Not only was she to live the wildest dream of Ida Hook, but she had made up her mind to bring the most important man in Montana to her feet on that triumphant night. That the man was her husband, won the first time without an effort, lost through her own indifference and ignorance, added tenfold to the zest of the game. She knew the impression he must retain of her: crude, obvious in her sex allurement, cheaply dressed, a sort of respectable mining-camp siren; all her fascinations second-rate, and her best points in the eyes of an absent-minded husband her good-natured mothering and admirable cooking.