In the few days that had elapsed since his return to Leadville he had been making determined but futile efforts to close the gap; to regard the year of exile as an incident, and to take up the normal thread of life where he had dropped it the preceding spring. The discovery that this could not be done--that the change from flannel shirt, corduroys and miner’s boots to civilized clothes, and from a log cabin in the wilds to a comfortable hotel in the great mining-camp, wrought no miracle of readjustment--was confusing. Was the curious inner consciousness of a changed point of view merely a step forward in character development? Or had the step been taken in the opposite direction--into the region of things primitive and baldly disillusioning? He could not tell; and the inability to make the distinction was strangely disturbing. When the attempt to account for his present mental attitude became a fatiguing strain, he twisted his chair from the window to make it face the scene in the handsomely furnished business office. At a table in the middle of the room, Bromley, garmented as a gentleman of leisure and wearing his good clothes with an easy and accustomed grace that Philip envied, was talking in low tones with a stockily built man whose dark eyes, heavy brows and aquiline nose gave his features a Jewish cast. Half absently Philip, compared the two faces: Bromley’s high-bred, animated, impishly youthful; Stephen Drew’s strong, kindly--the face of a man whose generous dealings with his friends and business associates had given him a notability as marked as that of the lavish spenders who were making the name of the Colorado “lucky-strike” miner a synonym for all that was fantastic and extravagant. The moment, as Philip tried, rather ineffectually, to realize, was epochal. Drew and his party of experts had spent a fortnight at the “Little Jean,” exploring, testing, estimating the probable extent of the ore body and preparing samples for additional assays. And now, as the net result, at the farther end of the business office Drew’s attorney was dictating to a young clerk whose pen was flying rapidly over the pages of legal cap paper--using the pen, though one of the new writing machines lately come into use stood on its iron-legged table within easy reach. After a time the lawyer came to the table in the middle of the room with the finished document in his hands and ran through its provisions with his client and Bromley. Drew nodded and dipped a pen, looking up to say to Philip: “All right, Mr. Trask; if you’ll come and look this over----”