“What?” Dan’s face fell.  “You are going to attack the chief!  I had no idea of that!” He looked genuinely distressed and a little stern.

She laid a pleading hand upon his arm.  “Forgive me, Dan,” she said.  “I knew how you would feel, and, to tell the truth, I don’t like that part of it one bit.  But it was my big chance—­the sort of thing I have been waiting years for.  I couldn’t bear to miss it.”  There was a suspicion of tears in her eyes.  “I didn’t think it all out.  I just came.  Things get awfully mixed, don’t they?  Of course I wouldn’t attack him unfairly, but I do believe in conservation—­and what could I do but come here to you?”

Dan smiled to reassure her.  “Perhaps you won’t feel like excoriating him when you learn more about things.  I know you wouldn’t be unfair.  You’d flunk the job first.  Wait till you talk to him.  But you can’t refuse his kindness, for a time at least.  There’s nowhere else for you to stay, and Murray would pick you up and put you into the cottage, muck-rake and all, if I didn’t.  He had to go out on the work this morning or he’d have been here to welcome you.  He sent apologies and said a lot of nice things, which I’ve forgotten.”

“Well”—­Eliza still looked troubled—­“all right.  But wait,” she cried, with a swift change of mood.  “I’ve made a little friend, the dearest, the most useless creature!  We shared the same stateroom and we’re sisters.  She actually says I’m pretty, so of course I’m her slave for life.”  She hurried away in the midst of Dan’s loyal protestations that she was pretty—­more beautiful than the stars, more pleasing to the eye than the orchids of Brazil.  A moment later she reappeared to present Natalie Gerard.

Dan greeted the new arrival with a cordiality in which there was a trace of shyness unusual with him.  “We’ve made quite a change since you were up here, Miss Gerard,” he remarked.  “The ships stop first at Omar now, you see.  I trust it won’t inconvenience you.”

“Not in the least,” said Natalie.  “I shall arrive at Hope quite soon enough.”  “Omar Khayyam is out in the wilderness somewhere,” Eliza informed her girl friend, “with his book of verses and his jug of wine, I suppose.”

“Mr. O’Neil?”

“Yes.  But he’ll be back soon, and meanwhile you are to come up and see our paradise.”

“It—­looks terribly wet,” Natalie ventured.  “Perhaps we’d better wait until the rain stops.”

“Please don’t,” Dan laughed.  “It won’t stop until autumn and then it will only change to snow.  We don’t have much sunshine—­”

“You must!  You’re tanned like an Indian,” his sister exclaimed.

“That’s rust!  O’Neil wanted to get a record of the bright weather in Omar, so he put a man on the job to time it, but the experiment failed!”

“How so?”

“We didn’t have a stop-watch in town.  Now come!  Nobody ever catches cold here—­there isn’t time.”