"Old age?" Stainton's clear eyes snapped. "I had to go at that in another way, but there at least I have succeeded. George, I have trained like a Spartan. I have lived like a monk----" "Don't I know it, Jim? Remember that night I tried to lure you into the dance-hall at Durango?" "I have kept hard and keen and clean," said Stainton. "I have got myself--you can guess by what denials and sacrifice and fights--into the shape where the fear of senility, of loss or depreciation of my powers, is reduced to the irreducible minimum." He spoke a little boastfully, but so earnestly that there was, in tone or words, no hint of the prig. "Tap that," he said. He expanded his wide chest. He offered his biceps to Holt's congratulatory fingers. He filled his glass to the brim and balanced it, at arm's length, on the palm of his hand without spilling a drop of the wine. "I went this morning," he said joyously, "to the best doctor in this New York of yours. That fellow went over me with all the latest disease-detecting and age-detecting machinery known to science." "Well?" asked Holt. "He said that I was to all intents and purposes not a day over twenty-five." Holt nodded approval. "And you've kept your heart and mind as young as you've kept your body; that's a cinch," said he. "Younger," declared Stainton. "I have had to fight there harder than anywhere else, but I have won. In spite of that first love disappointment, in spite of friends that have gone back on me now and then, in spite of rough work in rough places and among rough men, in spite of money lost and money won, I have kept on believing. I was saying to someone else this evening that there was comfort in the philosophy of the sour-grapes, but I didn't really mean it. At any rate, I never followed the sour-grape school. I have just believed. That is the whole secret of it, George; all that you have to do is to say to yourself; 'I don't care; I won't doubt. I _believe_ in the world; I believe in Man.'" Holt smiled. "Wait till you know New York," said he. "I am doubt-proof," answered Stainton. "I am immune." "And so----" urged Holt, dropping this phase of the subject and reverting to Preston Newberry's niece. "And so," Stainton took him up, "I decided to marry, sell my mine as soon as a good offer comes and be easy. I came to New York. I went to-night to the opera." His voice grew unaffectedly softer. "And at the opera," he said, "I saw the girl that I had loved all those years ago; that dead girl come to life again; not a curve altered, not a tint faded; not a day older. I knew, in a flash, that it must be my old sweetheart's daughter. And it was." "What? Muriel Stannard?" "Whose mother was Muriel Benson. Precisely." Holt whistled softly. "Well?" asked he. "Well," said Stainton, "I intend to marry her." For a moment Holt made no comment. Then he coughed and finally, as his dry cough produced no visible effect, he broke forth: "But, Jim----" There he stopped.