“Have you seen Dan?” she asked of the cook.

“Wung Lu make nice fire,” grinned the Chinaman.  “Misser Dan in there.”

She thought for an instant.

“Is breakfast ready, Wung?”

“Pretty soon quick,” nodded Wung Lu.

“Then throw out the coffee or the eggs,” she said quickly.  “I don’t want breakfast served yet; wait till I send you word.”

As the door closed behind her, the eye-brows of Wung rose into perfect Roman arches.

“Ho!” grunted Wung Lu, “O ho!”

In the hall Kate met Randall Byrne coming down the stairs.  He was dressed in white and he had found a little yellow wildflower and stuck it in his button-hole.  He seemed ten years younger than the day he rode with her to the ranch, and now he came to her with a quick step, smiling.

“Doctor Byrne,” she said quietly, “breakfast will be late this morning.  Also, I want no one to go into the living-room for a while.  Will you keep them out?”

The doctor was instantly gone.

“He hasn’t gone, yet?” he queried.

“Not yet.”

The doctor sighed and then, apparently following a sudden impulse, he reached his hand to her.

“I hope something comes of it,” he said.

Even then she could not help a wan smile.

“What do you mean by that, doctor?”

The doctor sighed again.

“If the inference is not clear,” he said, “I’m afraid that I cannot explain.  But I’ll try to keep everyone from the room.”

She nodded her thanks, and went on; but passing the mirror in the hall the sight of her face made her stop abruptly.  There was no vestige of colour in it; and the shadow beneath her eyes made them seem inhumanly large and deep.  The bright hair, to be sure, waved over her head and coiled on her neck, but it was like a futile shaft of sunlight falling on a dreary moor in winter.  She went on thoughtfully to the door of the living-room but there she paused again with her hand upon the knob; and while she stood there she remembered herself as she had been only a few months before, with the colour flushing in her face and a continual light in her eyes.  There had been little need for thinking then.  One had only to let the wind and the sun strike on one, and live.  Then, in a quiet despair, she said to herself:  “As I am—­I must win or lose—­as I am!” and she opened the door and stepped in.

She had been cold with fear and excitement when she entered the room to make her last stand for happiness, but once she was in, it was not so hard.  Dan Barry lay on the couch at the far end of the room with his hands thrown under his head, and he was smiling in a way which she well knew; it had been a danger signal in the old days, and when he turned his face and said good-morning to her, she caught that singular glimmer of yellow which sometimes came up behind his eyes.  In reply to his greeting she merely nodded, and then walked slowly to the window and turned her back to him.