At first, Job left the narrow, well-worn streets, always, it seemed to him, crowded with an endless procession of dirty, pale-faced, muscular, rough men going to and from shifts; left them far behind and tramped over to the Frost Creek school, redolent with peculiar memories, to the afternoon service. But when the snows came and winter set in, he dared not take the long tramps, but hugged the fire at his boarding-house, read his little Testament, and tried in vain to find one spot out of hearing of the noise of tramping feet, the roar of the stamp-mill, and the hoarse laughter and rude stories and language of the men ever coming and going. He could never get away from the sound, and only in an old, abandoned shaft back of the office could he crawl down out of sight to pray. But Job never forgot to pray in those days. He was learning, as never before, what it is to be in the world and yet not of it; in its turmoil and din, sharing its work, mingling with its strange humanity, and yet living in the atmosphere of prayer and high thinking; in a world of impurity, yet living a pure life; a world of evil words, and yet never even thinking them; in the world, and yet not of it. Job Malden was fast growing into manhood. It was in those long winter days at the Yellow Jacket that the heart came back to him and somehow he found himself thinking of Jane Reed. The bitter memory of the folly of those days last winter at the Frost Creek school still haunted him, and yet the hardness had gone out of his soul. He had no right to think of Jane, he felt; he had forfeited all claim to her affection. But somehow the old love came back, and he longed to go to her and be forgiven. What a true girl she was!--a child of the mountains. Little she knew of the city and its guile, of society and its masks. How could he ever have thought her common or beneath him! She towered up in his thought like the pines of her native mountains, as fresh and natural and wild as they. He would not have her different. She was far above him. Faith, and church, and simple homely virtues, and all that is holy, were linked in Job's mind with the memory of artless, honest, great-hearted Jane that came back to him in the lonely hours at the mine. One day he started back at seeing a strangely familiar face present itself at the pay window. "Oh, yer needn't be scart,' Job, because yer old pard's got a job in the Yellow Jacket as well as yer." It was Dan's voice. "Must be mighty nice in there handin' out the boodle to us poor, hard-worked laborers; mighty easy to tuck a little of it in yer pocket now and then." Job colored, and replied that it was not his money, and he only took his pay like the men.