“You certainly had a good right to,” said Ford, who would have sworn in her behalf that the morally black was spotlessly white.  “But how could you be implicated?”

“That was what puzzled me then—­and it is puzzling me still.  They said—­or rather Mr. North said—­that you—­that you had bought me!”

Ford did not say that he would like to buy, beg, borrow or steal any kind of right to call her his own, but if his lips did not form the words they were lying at the bottom of the steady gray eyes for her to take or leave as she chose.

“I am sure you couldn’t have heard that part of it quite straight,” he said, almost regretfully.

“But I did, because it was repeated.  Mr. North insisted that you had bought me; and I didn’t like the way in which he said it, either.  He called me ’the little Alicia’.”

“What!” said Ford; and then a flood of light burst in upon at least one of the dark places.  “It’s only a mine,” he said sheepishly.  “And I did buy it, or half of it.”

She was regarding him accusingly now.

“Did you—­did you name it?” she asked, and there was the merest breath of frost in the air.

He was glad to be able to tell the truth without flinching.

“No; it is one of the earliest of the Copah prospects, and I suppose the discoverer named it.  I am willing to defend his choice, though.  He couldn’t have found a prettier name.”

She went back to the matter in hand with womanly swiftness.  “But the mine:  you had a right to buy it, didn’t you?”

“I should suppose so.  I paid for it with my own money, anyway.”

“Then why should Mr. North use it as an argument against you in speaking to Uncle Sidney?  He did that—­I am sure he did that.”

“Now the water has grown too deep for me,” said Ford.  “Why, North, himself, is interested in Copah, openly.  He owns half a dozen claims.”

“Near yours?” she queried.

Ford stopped to consider.  “To tell the truth, I don’t know where mine is,” he confessed.  “I bought it as the school-boys trade pocket-knives—­sight unseen.  You wouldn’t believe it of a grown man, would you?”

“What made you buy it at all?”

Again he told the simple truth—­and tried not to flinch.

“You won’t mind if I say that the name attracted me?  I thought a mine, or anything, that bore your name, ought to be good and—­and desirable.  And it is a good mine; or it will be, by and by.  Some morning I shall wake up and find myself rich.  At least that is what my partner, Grigsby, assures me; and I believe him when I happen to remember it.”

She neither approved nor disapproved.  When she spoke, it was of the present necessity.  “We must go back to the others now,” she said.  “Or at least I must.  Do you know what is to be done to-day?”

Ford spread his hands.

“Your uncle will set the pace.  I wouldn’t venture a guess, after last night.”