“He is apparently too busy,” said Alton.  “Still, I fancy if you asked him he would support me.”

Mrs. Forel smiled mischievously, “Well, though one could scarcely blame you, jealousy wouldn’t do you any good.  Those two were great friends in the old country.”

“That,” said Alton, “is a little indefinite.”

“Of course, but I don’t know anything more,” said his companion.  “Lieutenant Atkinson, who knew them both, told me.  Thorne wasn’t rich, you see, but he comes of good people, and not long ago somebody left him all their money.  Quite romantic, isn’t it?  Still, don’t you think Miss Deringham would be thrown away upon anybody less than a baronet.”

Alton did not answer, but his face grew somewhat grim as once more he glanced across at Thorne.  This, he thought, was a good man, and he had all that Alton felt himself so horribly deficient in.  In the meanwhile Mrs. Forel was looking at Seaforth, who was talking to the wife of an English financier.

“I like your partner, and he is from the old country, too,” she said.  “Of course you know what he was over there?”

It was put artlessly, but Alton’s eyes twinkled.  “I’m afraid I don’t, though I’ve no doubt Charley would have told me if I’d asked him,” he said.  “He is a tolerably useful man in this country, anyway, and that kind of contented me.”

The lady shook her head at him reproachfully.  “And I thought you were slow in the bush,” said she.  “Still, Thorne will know.”

Alton fancied his hostess intended to be kind to him, but he was glad when the dinner was over and he gravitated with the other men towards Forel’s smoking-room.  There, as it happened, the talk turned upon shooting and fishing, and when one or two of the guests had narrated their adventures in the ranges, one who was bent and grizzled told in turn several grim stories of the early days when the treasure-seekers went up into the snows of Caribou.  There was a brief silence when he had finished, until one of the Englishmen said: 

“I presume things of that kind seldom happen now?”

“I don’t know,” said Seaforth, who spoke in the Western idiom.  “We have still a few of the good old-fashioned villains right here in this country, and that reminds me of a thing which happened to a man I know.  He was a quiet man, and quite harmless so long as nobody worried him, but generally held on with a tight grip to his own, and he once got his hands into something another man wanted.  That was how the fuss began.”

There was a little pause, during which Alton glanced bewilderedly at his comrade, and Deringham glanced round as he poured himself out a whisky and seltzer.

“It’s not an uncommon beginning,” said Forel.  “What was the end?”