“I am an engineer, you know; that means a fellow who is trained to action—­all the time.  If he can’t get results fast enough by working his men by day he works them by night also—­day-and-night shifts—­and works with them, too, much of the time.  In that way—­well, samples taken from our south drift assay more than we had dared to hope a ton, but not till we got well in.  The vein may pinch out, of course, but there are no signs of it.  I expect it to widen instead, and grow richer in quality.  So—­if you’ll forgive the miner’s analogy—­with another vein I know of—­the finest sort of gold!”

So the correspondence began.  It was easy for a young woman of Dorothy’s discernment to see that here was no case for a long-distance flirtation, if she had wanted one.  From the moment when she had flung her left hand into Waldron’s right, and that other moment when she had told him with absolute truth that she was not afraid with him beside her, he had taken her at her word.  She could not play with him, even if he had been near her; far less now that thousands of miles separated them.  She answered with a letter of twice the length of her first one, a gay little letter, full of incident and her comments thereon.  The reply came promptly, and this time it was a long one.  He told her many details of the situation as it was developing in these new, extraordinarily promising mines; and she found it as fascinating as a fairy tale.  But, of course, although she read these pages many times over, she read more often certain opening and closing passages.  One ran like this: 

“Now to bed—­and to work again with the dawn.  While I am writing to you I forget everything about me.  Natives may chatter near me; I don’t hear them.  My friend Hackett may come and fire a string of questions at me; he tells me afterward my answers wouldn’t do credit to a monkey on a stick.  I am lost in the attempt to put your face before me—­your face as I saw it last.  There was not much light in the car, but what there was fell on your face.  I see rose colour always; what was it—­the bonnet?—­if they call those things bonnets!  I see more rose colour—­reflection?  I see a pair of eyes which were not afraid to look into mine—­for a minute; only for a minute—­but I can see them.

“The night grows cold.  Even in the tropics the nights may be cold in the mountains.  My fire has burned down to a few coals.  My bunk awaits me; I thought I was tired when I sat down to write.  I’m not tired now—­refreshed!

“Good-night!  Sleep well—­up there somewhere in the North!”

After this letter Dorothy Broughton went about like a girl in a dream.

Yet she was so practical a girl, had been so thoroughly trained to fill her days with things worth while, that she was able to keep up a very realistic appearance of being absorbed in the old round of duties and pleasures.  She was leading a life by no means idle or useless.  As for the happiness of it, she carried about with her a constant sense that something wonderful had happened, was happening—­and was yet to happen—­which made no task too hard for her newly vitalized spirit.