"Oh, can't you see?" The words wrought themselves into a plea, though she strove to say them dispassionately. "If it touch your self-respect ever so little, the sacrifice is all yours." That point of view was quite new to Bartrow. He took time to think it out, but when the truth clinched itself he went straight to the mark. "I never saw that side of it before--don't quite see it now. But if you do, that's different. It's you, little woman; and I do love you--you, yourself, and not your money. I wish I could go on and say the rest of it, but I can't. Will you take me for better or for worse--with an even chance that it's going to be all worse and no better?" Her eyes filled with quick tears, and her voice was tremulous. "It would serve you right if I should say no; you've fairly made me beg you to ask me!" Her hand was on the arm of the chair, and he possessed himself of it and raised it to his lips with gentle reverence. "You'll have to begin making allowances for me right at the start," he said humbly. "When I make any bad breaks you must remember it's because I don't know any better, and that away down deep under it all I love you well enough to--to go to jail for you. Will you wait for me while I skirmish around and try to get on my feet again?" "No"--with sweet petulance. "There it is, you see; another bad break right on top of the first. Suppose you talk a while and let me listen. I'm good at listening." "I'll wait, if you want me to,--and if you will let me help you to go on with the Little Myriad." Bartrow's laugh had a ring of boyish joy in it. "Back to the old cross-roads, aren't we? I'll let you in on it now; but if you take the mine you'll have to take the man along with the other incumbrances,--simultaneously, so to speak." "I thought you were anxious to wait." "If you were as poor as I am, I'd ask you to make it high noon to-morrow." "Oh! the money again. Can't we put it aside, once for all? There isn't so much of it as you may imagine." Bartrow overleaped the barrier at a bound. "Then let's make it noon to-morrow. If we are going to push the Myriad I ought to go back to-morrow night." She tried to scoff at him, but there was love in her eyes. "Connie said once that you were Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses, but she doesn't know you. I believe you more than half mean it." "I do mean it. If I sit here and look at you much longer I shall be begging you to make it nine o'clock instead of twelve. Don't ask me to wait very long. It'll be hard enough to go off and leave you afterward. It's a good bit more than a hundred miles in a straight line from Denver to Topeka Mountain." "I'm going with you," she said calmly. "You?--to live in a wicky-up on the side of a bald mountain? But you know what it is; you've been there. You'd die of the blues in a week."