“They are two very foolish men, Mr. Benson—I mean my husband and his brother.” “Then he has told you?” he said quickly. “That he is going with the party—yes.” She put out her hand and touched the reins Benson loosely held. “You can spare me a moment? I have been waiting for you.” He bowed a trifle stiffly. To him she had always seemed, if anything, too undemonstrative, too self-reliant; but he saw now that she was shaken out of her dignity and serenity; she was struggling as her mother and her mother's mother before her had struggled, when the wilderness spoke to the men they loved; and she was knowing as they must have known, that this masculine passion which no woman could comprehend, much less share in, but against which she had set her love, was as vital as that love itself. The lawyer put his hand in the breast pocket of his coat upon a paper there; one sentence in this paper burned in his memory: To my dearly beloved wife, Virginia Randolph Landray, and then the description of the property Stephen Landray owned and wished to pass to her in the event of his death. Benson had drawn up the will only the week before, and he was now taking it to Landray to be signed and witnessed. “I am a childless man, Benson,” Landray had said, “and should anything happen to me, I want every dollar I own on earth to go to her.” And Landray had shown no little emotion, for the moment putting aside the habitual reserve with which he cloaked any special stress of feeling. “But what do you want with a will?” Benson had asked. “Whom have you but your wife?” “I've got to worrying about that Californian venture of our's, and before I go I want to put my affairs in some sort of shape.” “Then you shall go, after all?” Benson had said. “I must; there's no help for it. What do you think of the scheme, anyhow?” “Well, I think better of it now that I know you are going to assume the direction of it.” “That's odd, with the knowledge you have,” said Landray, with a short laugh. Benson had not been surprised at what Landray had told him of his intentions; indeed, the whole project, the journey overland, with its hardships and possible danger, the search for the gold when California should be reached, would be but episodes in a speculation for which he felt the Landrays were singularly fitted. They were not business men, no one knew this better than he; they had possessed large means, though the fortune which they had inherited from their father was now much impaired by bad management and the luckless ventures in which they had involved themselves.