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“If you had only told her your name, Henry! Then she would have had a fingerpost to warn her off our ground. To think what you did for her, and how you are repaid!”

“It was a very foolish thing I did for her; I wasn’t proud of it. That was one reason why I did not tell her my name.”

Mr. Thorne removed his weight from the cot. The warped wires twanged back into place.

“Come, Maggie, we are too old not to trust in the Lord–or something. Anyhow, it’s cooler. I believe we shall sleep to-night.”

“And haven’t I murdered sleep for you, you poor old man? What a thing it is to have nerve and no nerves! I know you feel just as wrecked as I do. I wish you would say so. I want it said to the uttermost. If I could but–our only boy–our boy of ‘highest hopes’! You remember the dear old Latin words in his first ‘testimonials’?”

“They must have been badly disappointed in their girl, and I suppose they had their ‘hopes,’ too.”

“They should not drag another into the pit, one too innocent to have imagined such treachery.”

“I wouldn’t make too much of his innocence. He is all right so far as we know; he’s got precious little excuse for not being: but there is no such gulf between any two young humans; there can’t be, especially when one is a man. Take my hand. There’s a step there.”

Two shapes in white, with shadows preposterously lengthening, went down the hill. The long, dark house was open now to the night.

* * * * *

There is no night in the “stilly” sense at a mine.

The mill glared through all its windows from the gulch. Sentinel lights kept watch on top. The hundred stamps pounded on. If they ceased a moment, there followed the sob of the pump, or the clang of a truck-load of drills dumped on the floor of the hoisting-works, or the thunder of rock in the iron-bound ore-bins. All was silence on the hill; but a wakeful figure wrapped in white went up and down the empty porches, light as a dead leaf on the wind. It was the mother, wasting her night in grievous thinking, sighing with weariness, pining for sleep, dreading the day. How should they presume to tell that woman’s story, knowing her only through one morbid chapter of her earliest youth, which they had stumbled upon without the key to it, or any knowledge of its sequel? She longed to feel that they might be merciful and not tell it. She coveted happiness for her son, and in her heart was prepared for almost any surrender that would purchase it for him. If the lure were not so great! If the woman were not so blinding fair, why, then one might find a virtue in excusing her, in condoning her silence, even. But, clothed in that power, to have pretended innocence as well!

The roar of the stamp-heads deadened her hearing of the night’s subtler noises. Her thoughts went grinding on, crushing the hard rock of circumstance, but incapable of picking out the grains of gold therein. Later siftings might discover them, but she was reasoning now under too great human pressure for delicate analysis.

She saw the planets set and the night-mist cloak the valley. By four o’clock daybreak had put out the stars. She went to her room then and fell asleep, awakening after the heat had begun, when the house was again darkened for the day’s siege.

She was still postponing, wandering through the darkened rooms, peering into closets and bureau drawers to see, from force of habit, how Ito discharged his trust.

At luncheon she asked her husband if he had written. He made a gesture expressing his sense of the hopelessness of the situation in general.