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They stood eye to eye while the girl swiftly read the sheer honesty lying behind the man’s eyes. Then she shook her head.

“No,” she said, “I’m going to sell. I’m going to sell, and I’ll just wait around after, hoping for the day to come when the Aurora Clan will reckon that Bad Booker’s a sort of nightmare disease an’ needs plenty good med’cine. Thanks, Ivor. It’s just a real kind thought of yours, and the thing that makes me glad is I know you mean it just as you’ve said it. But I don’t want your money. I—I wouldn’t take it if it was that or—or starve.”

For all there was something of roughness in the girl’s choice of words for her refusal, there was none in her manner. Even her hope that one day Booker would receive his medicine at the hands of the secret Aurora Clan was without undue feeling. The man was deeply stirred.

They were great friends, these two. But for the man’s peace of mind the frank nature of their friendship was deplorable. He loved the girl with all the strength of his manhood. He held a big position with the Mountain Oil Corporation of Ohio as their consulting engineer, and his whole desire was to take this child of the northern wilderness away to his far-off home in the sunlit valleys of California. She had refused to marry him more than once. But somehow her refusal had left their friendship unaffected. She liked him whole-heartedly in a manner that to her precluded all possibility of regard of a deeper nature, but which in the man only contrived to strengthen his natural persistence.