A little flutter of white from a clump of brush attracted his eyes, and he extracted from the brambles a dainty handkerchief still fragrant with the personality of the girl he loved. He lifted it to his lips tightly, and, with a heart that was almost in pain, dropped to the line, and sat on the pipe, bent, and utterly dejected. He sat there for some minutes, and then a sound caused him to straighten himself with a jerk. The black horse was thundering down the hill as he had seen it on those other mornings when, looking backward, the "world was young." "I saw you, Mr. Townsend," Miss Presby said as he assisted her to alight, and her voice was sympathetic and grave. "You are unhappy. I don't blame you. I have heard all about it, and--well, I have had to fight an hourly impulse to come to you ever since I heard the news. Oh, my friend, believe me, I am so sorry! So sorry!" He could not reply, lest his voice betray the emotions aroused by her kindly sympathy. All his yearnings were fanned to flame by the cadence of her voice and the softness of her eyes. Mechanically he resumed his place on the pipe, and she seated herself by his side, half-facing him. Her slender foot, booted, braced against the ground, and almost touching his heavy miner's boot, tapped its toe on the sward as if she were impatient to find words. "It has been a little tough," he said; "but it seems less hard to me now that I know you care." He had blundered in his first words to the beginning of dangerous heights, and his pulses gave a wild throb when he glanced up at her and saw a light in her face, in her eyes, in her whole attitude, that he had never surprised there before. Words, unuttered, leaped hotly from his heart; a mad desire to tell of his love, of the visions he had seen in the air, on the blue of the peaks, in the cool shadows of the forests, in the black depths hundreds of feet under the ground. Of how the Croix d'Or had come to represent, not financial success, but a battle for her, and his love. His face went white, and he bit his dry, twisting lips, and clenched his hands until they hurt. "Not now!" he savagely commanded himself. "Not now!" She appeared to be thinking of something she had to say, and her first words rendered him thankful that he had held his tongue, otherwise he might never have known the depths of the girl seated there by his side. "I don't want you to think me forward," she said quietly; "but I have wanted for the last two days to ask you something. It makes it easier now that I know you know, that--that I care for it. What are your--your--how are your finances?"