“The—the rude—boor!” she said to herself, at loss for words to express fittingly that to which she was so little accustomed. A lingering touch or a gentle pressure was the usual fare of Miss Barrington’s graciously extended hand—never this wordless touching of her finger-tips and hasty, rude release. “Not that I care,” she thought, with a disdainful tilt of her head. “But he might have been decently civil!” she added, with a scornful smile as she thought of how differently a score of pampered youths of her acquaintance would have received so signal a mark of favor as she had that afternoon bestowed on an all too unappreciative miner. * * * * * When Hustler Joe had left Miss Barrington so abruptly he had attacked his work with a fierceness that even the miners had never seen him show. “A good man—a good man—‘I knew you were a good man’!” he muttered between his teeth. “A ‘good’ man indeed—bah!” he snarled aloud, wielding his pick with long, sweeping strokes. Then he suddenly stood upright. “Great God—am I not a good man? Have fifty lives not a feather’s weight?” The pick dropped from his relaxed fingers, and his hands went up to his head. “Ah, no,” he moaned; “father—father—fifty, a hundred—a thousand times a hundred could not tip the scale with your dear, dead self on the other side!” IX Exciting days came to Skinner Valley. Gold was discovered far up the creek. A man furnished with funds by Mark Hemenway, who long had expressed faith in the locality, had “struck it rich,” and the general superintendent awoke one day to find himself wealthy. The effect of this awakening was as immediate as it was startling. His commanding tones took on an added imperiousness, his clothing a new flashiness, and his whole demeanor an importance likely to impress the most casual of beholders. His veiled attentions to Miss Barrington gave way to a devoted homage that was apparent to all men, and so thick was his armor of self-conceit that her daily snubs fell pointless at his feet. Miss Barrington had never before spent so long a time at The Maples, and Mr. Hemenway’s sudden accession to wealth resulted, as far as she was concerned, in hasty preparations to leave. Her guests were already gone. On the day before her intended departure she started off by herself to enjoy one more sunset from the clearing beyond the Deerfield woods, the place where she and Dorothy were overtaken by that memorable thunder-shower. Mark Hemenway did not confine himself so strictly to business these days as had heretofore been his custom, and he was upstairs in his room when he spied Miss Barrington’s lithe figure disappearing in the grove that skirted the grounds on the west. The general superintendent had lately invested in a tall silk hat, and it was this impressive bit of headgear that he donned as he left the house and followed, at a discreet distance, the form of the woman he meant to marry.