“The two cities are said to be much alike.” And he launched into a description of the stark hill, once known as Perch of the Devil, for unarguable reasons, where the inhabitants walked over copper-mines a mile in depth and sometimes found outcroppings in their back yards. He was grateful to her for introducing a subject which cost him no effort, and he had been able to see the beauty as well as the smiting ugliness of that ore-scorched region. In winter when the high valley was covered with snow it had a cold loveliness of its own, particularly under the blue dawn of Montana. That phrase had occurred to him as he walked home before sunrise one morning after a call to The Flat to patch up a woman so severely injured in an amorous dispute that it was impossible to move her. His sentences were brief and unadorned but it seemed to Gita that she had a complete vision of that unique “camp” in the Rocky Mountains with its sinister and unsleeping life underground and its scarred and feverish surface. “I’ll go there some day,” she said, and not merely to be polite. “It would be a new sensation to telephone to New York in a comfortable office a mile underground.” Bylant and Elsie had fallen silent and were listening, the latter with intense approval: Geoffrey was exerting himself to entertain a woman, and Gita was hanging on his words. Then she frowned. _That_ would be too obvious. One’s darling brother and beloved friend. Old stuff. Wouldn’t do, anyhow. What Geoff needed was a good old-fashioned wife to see that he got proper food at regular hours, and soothing and sufficiently intelligent conversation when at home. Whatever else Gita might become she never would be soothing and adaptable. Eustace Bylant might manage her. But the distinguished author had not manifested the slightest interest in this transitional friend of hers. Then she became aware that while leaning toward Geoffrey, Bylant was covertly watching Gita Carteret. There was a curious expression in his eyes . . . very curious. Not admiration; that would have been natural enough. Not even speculation—more natural still. Not dubiety. Gita, now that she had abandoned a hopeless pose, more especially when she wore soft and luminous satin and a rope of shimmering pearls, did not look in the least like a boy. She was still more handsome than beautiful, perhaps, for there was no trace of softness in her spirited features, and had it not been for her eyelashes she would have resembled too closely the eagle-like countenance of Mrs. Carteret. . . . His eyes had not even their “psychological look,” as when he was visibly admiring and inwardly impaling some elated woman. . . . No, it was—it was—Elsie almost lost her breath as the expression in Bylant’s eyes deepened to an inner certainty. Expectancy? Hope? She had watched it dawn out of a stare of keen appraisement, as if his critical faculty were determined to make no mistake.