Mr. Cameron turned again to his work. Jean sat silently beside him watching the firm lines with which he traced new winzes, drifts, and cross-cuts on the prints, the precision with which he wrote his comments on the borders. It was a strong face which bent over the table, strong, stern, and telling of a Scotch ancestry in which Mr. Cameron took great pride, for had not one of his forefathers fought in the army of the Lord of the Isles, and another been a faithful follower to the end of the hopeless Stuart cause! Clearly loyalty was a tradition of their race, and typical of that allegiance which still made all Scotch things dear to these two descendants of the old Highlanders, which led the father to hang on the bare walls of his cabin the shield of the Camerons with its armorial bearings of “or, three bars gules,” and impelled Jean to wear a Scotch cap, and always, somewhere about her dress, a touch of the red and blue Cameron plaid. Now, as Jean stood at her father’s side, it was easy to see the family likeness, for all the softening of age and sex, which had changed the lines of his face to the curves of hers. The same spirit looked out from both pairs of eyes, and if ever there should come a conflict of wills between the two, there would be as pretty a fight as once happened at Inverlochie, when Cameron and the Lord Protector fell foul of each other. Jean Cameron had been only a month in Quentin. She had begged to join her father and he had consented, although he had assured her that she would dislike the life. But from the first she had loved the place and everything about it. The atmosphere of crude labor, the men thrusting down into the mountains and drawing out the green-crusted ore, the rides across the trails, had brought her a sense of exhilaration. She had expected to find in the West the romance of freedom, of wildness, of the natural type. Instead, she had found, and it was infinitely more fascinating, the romance of work, of risk borne daily as a matter of course, not from love of danger, but because it meant bread. To a girl of her keen perception there was a meaning in it all. It was the first glimpse that she had ever had of a world where the little things of life had no existence and where the big things were the little things. CHAPTER IV During his convalescence, Stephen had many callers. Mr. Cameron paid him a short visit, and briskly and efficiently expressed his gratitude. At least this was the way in which Loring characterized it to himself, after his departure. From motives of kindness, most of the foremen and men from the office force came in to see him; from motives of self-interest, the visits were generally repeated, for Loring combined a drollness, a vein of narrative, and a wide range of experiences.