She was thinner than she had been a year earlier, and the dark eyes had candlelight shadows under them; still, the eyes were very much alive, and the thinness had not marred the perfect oval of her face. There was a lack of color in the pretty lips; that and a translucency of skin hinting at confining work and long hours, and, quite likely, he imagined, at sterner privations. The thought of the privations stirred him deeply. She was too fine and precious to be thrown into the grinding mill of a struggle for existence. Without doubt that was what had happened. She was carrying the burden for the family of four, and was, by her own admission, working all sorts of hours doing it. The dining-room was warm, and when she slipped out of her coat he went around to hang it up for her. With the coat in his hands he decided at once that it was too thin for a Denver evening wrap. Also, he noted that the collar and cuffs had been carefully turned and darned; and the same observation went for the tight-fitting basque with its bit of lace at the throat and the unmistakable signs of wear on the sleeves. Philip was not unfamiliar with the pinchings and makeshifts of economy; he had known them at home. But the signs of them here and now moved him strangely, as if life, which had lightly tossed Bromley and himself an incredible fortune, were bitterly unfair to the weak and more deserving. Going back to his place, he picked up the menu card and asked her what she would like to eat. “After a day’s work everything tastes good to me,” she answered, with the quick-flashing smile that carried him instantly back to a double seat in the Kansas Pacific day-coach and the spring-time afternoon when they had shared it together. “Won’t you order for both?” He gave the dinner order, making it commensurate with the healthy appetite he had brought back from the mountains. After the waiter had left them, he said: “You asked me as we were coming in if I had gone back to work in the railroad office. I haven’t--as yet.” “But you are meaning to?” “Not exactly. You see, I have another job now. I am keeping personal books for a chap who owns a half-interest in a new mine on the other side of the main range.” She was not so easily misled as Middleton had been. “Oh!” she said, with a little gasp; “then you _did_ find a mine?” “Yes; after so long a time--after we had knocked about digging foolish holes in the hills nearly all summer.” “‘We,’ you say. Did you really take the wild young man with you? I have thought about him so often.” “You mean Bromley?--the fellow who tried to hold me up the night I went out to the tent colony to see you?” “Yes. You told me about him, you remember.” He nodded. “Yes; he was the other half of the ‘we.’ He was my partner: he still is.” “And did he--was he----” A lack of loyalty was not one of Philip’s failings.