“Yes, at Dawson.  It was the one thing between her and hunger.”

She raised her hand, and on it he saw gleaming faintly the single ring which she wore.  Slowly she drew it from her finger.

“Then this, too, for luck—­the luck of Mary Standish,” she laughed softly, and flung the ring into the sea.

She faced him, as if expecting the necessity of defending what she had done.  “It isn’t melodrama,” she said.  “I mean it.  And I believe in it.  I want something of mine to lie at the bottom of the sea in this gateway to Skagway, just as Belinda Mulrooney wanted her dollar to rest forever at the bottom of the Yukon.”

She gave him the hand from which she had taken the ring, and for a moment the warm thrill of it lay in his own.  “Thank you for the wonderful afternoon you have given me, Mr. Holt.  I shall never forget it.  It is dinner time.  I must say good night.”

He followed her slim figure with his eyes until she disappeared.  In returning to his cabin he almost bumped into Rossland.  The incident was irritating.  Neither of the men spoke or nodded, but Rossland met Alan’s look squarely, his face rock-like in its repression of emotion.  Alan’s impression of the man was changing in spite of his prejudice.  There was a growing something about him which commanded attention, a certainty of poise which could not be mistaken for sham.  A scoundrel he might be, but a cool brain was at work inside his head—­a brain not easily disturbed by unimportant things, he decided.  He disliked the man.  As an agent of John Graham Alan looked upon him as an enemy, and as an acquaintance of Mary Standish he was as much of a mystery as the girl herself.  And only now, in his cabin, was Alan beginning to sense the presence of a real authority behind Rossland’s attitude.

He was not curious.  All his life he had lived too near the raw edge of practical things to dissipate in gossipy conjecture.  He cared nothing about the relationship between Mary Standish and Rossland except as it involved himself, and the situation had become a trifle too delicate to please him.  He could see no sport in an adventure of the kind it suggested, and the possibility that he had been misjudged by both Rossland and Mary Standish sent a flush of anger into his cheeks.  He cared nothing for Rossland, except that he would like to wipe him out of existence with all other Graham agents.  And he persisted in the conviction that he thought of the girl only in a most casual sort of way.  He had made no effort to discover her history.  He had not questioned her.  At no time had he intimated a desire to intrude upon her personal affairs, and at no time had she offered information about herself, or an explanation of the singular espionage which Rossland had presumed to take upon himself.  He grimaced as he reflected how dangerously near that hazard he had been—­and he admired her for the splendid judgment she had shown in the matter.  She had saved him the possible alternative of apologizing to Rossland or throwing him overboard!