Bartrow absorbed it by littles, and sat fingering the slip of paper with the Philadelphia address on it, quite unheedful of Wun Ling's thrice-repeated announcement that supper was ready. It was his first letter from her, and the fact was easily subversive of presence of mind. Not until the lilt of it had a little outworn itself could he bring himself down to any fair-minded consideration of the offer of help. But when it finally came to that, he put the letter in his pocket and went in to supper, smiling ineffably and shaking his head as one who has set his face flintwise against temptation. An hour later, however, when he was smoking his pipe on the porch step, the temptation beset him afresh. His faith in the ultimate success of the mine had never wavered. It was unshaken even now, when he was at the end of his resources, and a thing had happened which threatened to demand a costly change in the method of exploiting the lode. But to be confident for himself and for those who, knowing the hazard, had helped him hitherto, was one thing; and to take a stranger's money was quite another. And when the stranger chanced to be the friend of the woman he loved, a person who would invest in the Little Myriad solely on the ground of Miss Van Vetter's recommendation, the difference magnified itself until it took the shape of a prohibition. The light had faded out of the western sky, and the peaks of the main range stood out in shadowy relief against the star-dusted background. The homely noises in Wun Ling's sanctum had ceased, and silence begirt the great mountain. Bartrow tossed the extinct pipe through an open window, and began to pace the length of the slab-floored porch. It was not in him to give up without another struggle; a final struggle, he called it, though none knew better that there is no final struggle for a strong man save that which crowns perseverance with the chaplet of fruition. The temptation to grasp the hand held out to him was very subtle. If Miss Van Vetter could have been eliminated--if only the proposal had come direct from the Philadelphia capitalist, instead of through her. The sound of footsteps on the gravel at the tunnel's mouth broke into his reverie, and the figure of a man loomed dimly in the darkness at the foot of the path leading up to the cabin. It was McMurtrie, the mining engineer in charge of the Big Bonanza at Alta Vista. Bartrow called down to him. "Is that you, Mac? Don't come up; I'll be with you in a second." The engineer sat down on a tool-box and waited. "I'm a little late," he said, when Bartrow came down the path. "It's pay-day at the Bonanza. Get a lamp and let's go in and have a look at your new grief." "You didn't need to tramp up here in the dark," Bartrow rejoined, feeling in a niche in the timbering for a miner's lamp. "I'd given you up for to-night."