"I don't care to tell you either, but the Wayland fortune will carry such a tremendous responsibility with it that my successor will have to be a stronger man than I am to hold it together. I merely gathered it; he must keep it. You haven't qualified in either respect yet." Mildred had interrupted petulantly. "Oh, this endless chatter of money! It is disgusting. I only wish we were poor. Instead of a blessing, our wealth is an unmitigated curse--a terrible, exhausting burden. I hear of nothing else from morning till night. It gives us no pleasure, nothing but care and worry and--wrinkles. I can do without horses and motors and maids, and all that. I want to live, really to _live_." She had arisen and gone over to Boyd, laying her hand upon his shoulder. "I will give it all up. Let us try to be happy without it." It had been a tense moment for both men. Their eyes had met defiantly, but, reading in the father's face the contempt that waited upon an unmanly decision, Boyd's pride stood up stiffly. "No," he replied, "I can't let you do that. Not yet, anyhow. Mr. Wayland is right, in a way. If he had not been so decent I would have married you anyhow, but I am indebted to him. He has shown me a lot more of your life than I knew before, and he has made his word good. I am going to ask you to wait, however; for quite a while, it may be. I am going to take a gambler's chance." "What is it?" "A gold strike has been made in Alaska--" "Alaska!" "Yes! The Klondike. You have read of it? I am told that the chances there are like those in the days of '49, and I am going." So it was that he had made his choice, fixing his own time for returning, and so it was that Mildred Wayland had awaited him. If to-day, after three years of deprivation, she seemed to him more beautiful than ever--the interval having served merely to enhance her charm and strengthen the yearning of his heart--she seemed in the same view still further removed from his sphere. More reserved, more dignified, in the reserve of developed womanhood, her cession was the more gracious and wonderful. His story finished, Boyd went on to tell her vaguely of his future plans, and at the last he asked her, with something less than an accepted lover's confidence: "Will you wait another year?" She laughed lightly. "You dear boy, I am not up for auction. This is not the 'third and last call.' I am not sure I could induce anybody to take me, even if I desired." "I read the rumor of your engagement in a back number of a San Francisco paper. Is your retinue as large as ever?" She smiled indifferently. "It alters with the season, but I believe the general average is about the same. You know most of them." She mentioned a number of names, counting them off on her finger-tips. "Then, of course, there are the old standbys, Mr. Macklin, Tommy Turner, the Lawton boys--" "And Alton Clyde!" "To be sure; little Alton, like the brook, runs on forever. He still worships you, Boyd, by the way."