Deringham made no comment, but laid the card down beside him. "I
wonder," he said indifferently, "how you came to know me."

The chilling evenness of his voice seemed to irritate the other man,
and Alice Deringham was conscious of a faint amusement as she glanced
at them. Deringham in his tweed travelling attire, which, worn with
apparent carelessness, seemed to hang with every fold just where it
should be, was wholly at his ease, and there was a trace of
half-expressed toleration in his thin, finely-cut face, while Hallam
appeared to become coarse and embarrassed by comparison. He probably
did not feel so, for diffidence of any kind is not common in the West,
but he may have realized that in any delicate fencing the advantage
would lie with Deringham. Both, producing nothing and living upon the
toil of their fellows, played the same game, but, while the stakes and
counters are very similar, one played it in Vancouver and the other in
London, where a more subtle finesse is demanded from the players.

Hallam, however, smiled. "I don't know that you will be pleased when I
tell you, but this should explain things," he said. "Of course, since
your company took hold out here I have heard of you."

Deringham took the Colonial Journal handed him, glanced down a
paragraph, and passed it to his daughter. "Your maid!" he said. "I
fancied it was a mistake to part with her, my dear. It is evident she
has not gone home."

Alice Deringham unconsciously drew herself up a trifle, as her eyes ran
down the column. It was headed "Another missing heir," and ran: "We
are getting used to having our railroad-shovelling and trail-cutting
done by scions of the British aristocracy, and seldom ask them what