“Yes.  Let me give you a hand,” said Gordon, leaning down and helping him up.  “How are you?”

Wickersham looked at him quickly as he reached the boot.

“Hello!  You here?” The rest of his sentence was a malediction on the barbarians in the coach below and a general consignment of them all to a much warmer place than the boot of the Gumbolt stage.

“What are you doing here?” Wickersham asked.

“I am driving the stage.”

“Regularly?” There was something in the tone and look that made Keith wish to say no, but he said doggedly: 

“I have done it regularly, and was glad to get the opportunity.”

He was conscious of a certain change in Wickersham’s manner toward him.

As they drove along he asked Wickersham about Norman and his people, but the other answered rather curtly.

Norman had married.

“Yes.”  Keith had heard that.  “He married Miss Caldwell, didn’t he?  She was a very pretty girl.”

“What do you know about here?” Wickersham asked.  His tone struck Keith.

“Oh, I met her once.  I suppose they are very much in love with each other?”

Wickersham gave a short laugh.  “In love with Norman!  Women don’t fall in love with a lump of ice.”

“I do not think he is a lump of ice,” said Keith, firmly.

Wickersham did not answer at first, then he said sharply: 

“Well, she’s worth a thousand of him.  She married him for his money.  Certainly not for his brains.”

“Norman has brains—­as much as any one I know,” defended Keith.

“You think so!”

Keith remembered a certain five minutes out behind the stables at Elphinstone.

He wanted to ask Wickersham about another girl who was uppermost in his thoughts, but something restrained him.  He could not bear to hear her name on his lips.  By a curious coincidence, Wickersham suddenly said:  “You used to teach at old Rawson’s.  Did you ever meet a girl named Yorke—­Alice Yorke?  She was down this way once.”

Keith said that he had met “Miss Yorke.”  He had met her at Ridgely Springs and also in New York.  He was glad that it was dark, and that Wickersham could not see his face.  “A very pretty girl,” he hazarded as a leader, now that the subject was broached.

“Yes, rather.  Going abroad—­title-hunting.”

“I don’t expect Miss Yorke cares about a title,” said Keith, stiffly.

“Mamma does.  Failing that, she wants old Lancaster and perquisites.”

“Who does?  Why, Mr. Lancaster is old enough to be her father!”

“Pile’s old, too,” said Wickersham, dryly.

“She doesn’t care about that either,” said Keith, shortly.

“Oh, doesn’t she!  You know her mother?”

“No; I don’t believe she does.  Whatever her mother is, she is a fine, high-minded girl.”

Ferdy gave a laugh which might have meant anything.  It made Keith hot all over.  Keith, fearing to trust himself further, changed the subject and asked after the Rawsons, Wickersham having mentioned that he had been staying with them.