Keith laughed and was glad that her hair covered his face.  During those wonderful first days of the summer they were inseparable, except when matters of business took Keith away.  During these times he prepared for eventualities.  The Keith properties in Prince Albert, he estimated, were worth at least a hundred thousand dollars, and he learned from McDowell that they would soon go through a process of law before being turned over to his fortunate inheritors.  Before that time, however, he knew that his own fate would be sealed one way or the other, and now that he had Mary Josephine to look after, he made a will, leaving everything to her, and signing himself John Keith.  This will he carried in an envelope pinned inside his shirt.  As Derwent Conniston he collected one thousand two hundred and sixty dollars for three and a half years back wage in the Service.  Two hundred and sixty of this he kept in his own pocket.  The remaining thousand he counted out in new hundred-dollar bills under Mary Josephine’s eyes, sealed the bills in another envelope, and gave the envelope to her.

“It’s safer with you than with me,” he excused himself.  “Fasten it inside your dress.  It’s our grub-stake into the mountains.”

Mary Josephine accepted the treasure with the repressed delight of one upon whose fair shoulders had been placed a tremendous responsibility.

There were days of both joy and pain for Keith.  For even in the fullest hours of his happiness there was a thing eating at his heart, a thing that was eating deeper and deeper until at times it was like a destroying flame within him.  One night he dreamed; he dreamed that Conniston came to his bedside and wakened him, and that after wakening him he taunted him in ghoulish glee and told him that in bequeathing him a sister he had given unto him forever and forever the curse of the daughters of Achelous.  And Keith, waking in the dark hour of night, knew in his despair that it was so.  For all time, even though he won this fight he was fighting, Mary Josephine would be the unattainable.  A sister—­and he loved her with the love of a man!

It was the next day after the dream that they wandered again into the grove that sheltered Keith’s old home, and again they entered it and went through the cold and empty rooms.  In one of these rooms he sought among the titles of dusty rows of books until he came to one and opened it.  And there he found what had been in the corner of his mind when the sun rose to give him courage after the night of his dream.  The daughters of Achelous had lost in the end.  Ulysses had tricked them.  Ulysses had won.  And in this day and age it was up to him, John Keith, to win, and win he would!