Alan’s first thought was of the monstrous incongruity of the thing, the almost physical impossibility of a mesalliance of the sort Mary Standish had revealed to him.  He saw her, young and beautiful, with face and eyes that from the beginning had made him feel all that was good and sweet in life, and behind her he saw the shadow-hulk of John Graham, the pitiless iron-man, without conscience and without soul, coarsened by power, fiendish in his iniquities, and old enough to be her father!

A slow smile twisted his lips, but he did not know he smiled.  He pulled himself together without letting her see the physical part of the effort it was taking.  And he tried to find something to say that would help clear her eyes of the agony that was in them.

“That—­is a most unreasonable thing—­to be true,” he said.

It seemed to him his lips were making words out of wood, and that the words were fatuously inefficient compared with what he should have said, or acted, under the circumstances.

She nodded.  “It is.  But the world doesn’t look at it in that way.  Such things just happen.”

She reached for a book which lay on the table where the tundra daisies were heaped.  It was a book written around the early phases of pioneer life in Alaska, taken from his own library, a volume of statistical worth, dryly but carefully written—­and she had been reading it.  It struck him as a symbol of the fight she was making, of her courage, and of her desire to triumph in the face of tremendous odds that must have beset her.  He still could not associate her completely with John Graham.  Yet his face was cold and white.

Her hand trembled a little as she opened the book and took from it a newspaper clipping.  She did not speak as she unfolded it and gave it to him.

At the top of two printed columns was the picture of a young and beautiful girl; in an oval, covering a small space over the girl’s shoulder, was a picture of a man of fifty or so.  Both were strangers to him.  He read their names, and then the headlines.  “A Hundred-Million-Dollar Love” was the caption, and after the word love was a dollar sign.  Youth and age, beauty and the other thing, two great fortunes united.  He caught the idea and looked at Mary Standish.  It was impossible for him to think of her as Mary Graham.

“I tore that from a paper in Cordova,” she said.  “They have nothing to do with me.  The girl lives in Texas.  But don’t you see something in her eyes?  Can’t you see it, even in the picture?  She has on her wedding things.  But it seemed to me—­when I saw her face—­that in her eyes were agony and despair and hopelessness, and that she was bravely trying to hide them from the world.  It’s just another proof, one of thousands, that such unreasonable things do happen.”