"If your rich cousin will let you delve for him for a pittance I shall not interfere. I might tell him he could not put his mine into worse hands! I shall not alter the agreement we made ten years ago, which is that while you remain at a distance, and refrain from annoyance, I shall not seek legal separation." The husband looked with a faint smile at the crest of the Durgans on the fashionable notepaper, at the handwriting in which a resolute effort at fashion barely concealed a lack of education. In the diction and orthography he discerned the work of a second mind, and it was with a puzzled, as well as a troubled air, that he tore the paper into atoms and let them flutter over the precipice in the soft breeze. But the puzzle was beyond his reading, and the trouble he cast into the past. Whatever good he had deserved at the hands of his wife, it was not in his nature to feel that Providence dealt too hardly with him. As he rose to examine his new scene of work, the phrase of the huge negro returned to his mind, and he muttered to himself, "Yes, suh; that's all right!" He found a pick and hammer in the shed, and set himself instantly to break the rock where the vein of mica had already been worked. Weary as he soon became, he was glad to suppose that, having failed in dealing with his kind, he must wrestle now only with the solid earth, and in the peace of the wilderness. The angels, looking down upon him, smiled; for they know well that the warfare of the world is only escaped by selfishness, not by circumstance. Chapter II THE UNWELCOME GUEST The sun set glorious over the peaks of the Cherokee ridges, and their crimson outline lay dark, like a haven for the silver boat of the descending moon, when Durgan, satchel in hand, climbed the ascending foot-trail. The cart-road evidently reached the summit by further turnings; but this footpath, wending through close azalea scrub and under trees, emerged between one gable of the summit house and the higher rocks above it. On the other three sides of the house its open lands were broad enough. This had been the dwelling of the former miner. Durgan, already heralded by the barking of watch-dogs, could hardly pause to look at a place which would have been his perquisite had it not been bought at a fancy price by woman's caprice. The low shingled dwelling, weathered and overgrown by vines, was faced by a long, open porch. Its lawn was already bordered by a fringe of crocus flowers. The house was old, but, beyond a group of trees, a new barn and carriage-house were standing. The fences of garden, field, and meadow were also new. The whole property bore marks of recent improvements which betokened wealth and taste.