at any cost.  But when your ideal man comes—­the one who compels your respect and admiration for his strength of character, and for the usefulness of his life, the one whom you cannot help loving for his manhood alone—­mate with him—­no matter how light his purse or how lowly his rank in the world.’  And so you see, as soon as I learned to know you, I realized what you were to me.  But I wish—­oh, how I wish—­that father could have lived to know you, too.”

For some time they watched the dancing camp fire flames in silence, as though they had found in their love that true oneness that needs no spoken word.

Then Stanford said, “And to think that we expected to wait two years or more, and now—­thanks to a soulless corporation—­we are here in a little less than a year!”

“Thanks to no soulless corporation for that, sir,” retorted Helen with spirit.  “But thanks to the brains and strength and character of my husband.”

Two of the three weeks’ vacation granted the engineer had passed when Mrs. Manning, one afternoon, informed her husband that as the ordained provider for the household it was imperative that he provide some game for their evening meal.

“And what does Her Majesty, the cook, desire?” he asked.  “Venison, perhaps?”

She shook her head with decision.  “You will be obliged to go too far, and be gone too long, to get a deer.”

“But you’re going with me, of course.”

Again she shook her head.  “I have something else to do.  I can’t always be tagging around after you while you are providing, you know; and we may as well begin to be civilized again.  Just go a little way—­not so far that you can’t hear me call—­and bring me some nice fat quail like those we had day before yesterday.”

She watched him disappear in the brush and then busied herself about the camp.  Presently she heard the gun, and smiled as she pictured him hunting for their supper, much as though they were two primitive children of nature, instead of the two cultured members of a highly civilized race, that they really were.  Then, presently she must go to the spring for water, that he might have a cool drink when he returned.

She was half way to the spring, singing softly to herself, when a sound on the low ridge above the camp attracted her attention.  Pausing, she looked and listened.  The song died on her lips.  It could not be Staford coming so noisily through the brush and from that direction.  Even as the thought came, she heard the gun again, a little farther away down the narrow valley below the camp, and, in the same moment, the noise on the ridge grew louder, as though some heavy animal were crashing through the bushes.  And then suddenly, as she stood there in frightened indecision, a long-horned, wild-eyed steer broke through the brush on the crest of the ridge and plunged down the steep slope toward the camp.