"It will have to be something of that sort at first. I've told her all this too, Lady Farquhar."
"What does that matter if we love each other?" Moya asked.
"You'll find it matters a good deal," said Lady Jim dryly. "When poverty comes in love is likely to wink out any day. Of course I realize that yours is of a quality quite unusual. It always is, my dear. Every lover has thought that since time began."
"We'll have to take our fighting chance of that," Jack replied.
Moya, her eyes shining, nodded agreement. No great gain can be won without risk. She knew there was a chance that she might not find happiness in her love. But where it called her she must follow--to a larger life certainly, to joy and to sorrow, to the fuller experiences that must come to every woman who fulfills her destiny.
A voice hailed Jack. Colter was hurrying up the street, plainly excited. Kilmeny moved a few steps toward him.
Lady Jim took advantage of his absence to attack Moya from another angle. "My dear, I wish I could show you how much depends on a similarity of tastes, of habits, of standards. Matrimony means more than love. It means adjustment."
"I've thought of that too. But ... when you love enough that doesn't help the adjustment?" asked the girl naïvely.
She had appealed to Farquhar. That gentleman came to her assistance. "It does."
"This isn't a matter to be decided merely by personal preference," urged the older woman. "There may be--consequences."
The color beat into the face of the young woman in a wave, but her eyes held steadily to those of Lady Farquhar.
"I ... hope so."
"Bravo, Moya!" applauded her guardian, clapping his hands softly.
"Don't you think they--the consequences--deserve a better chance than you will give them?"
"I'll answer that, Di," spoke up Farquhar. "When a girl chooses for the father of her children a man who is clean and strong and virile, and on top of that her lover, she is giving them the best possible chance in life."
Moya's gratitude shone through the eyes that met those of her guardian.
Kilmeny swung back to the group he had left. "I've good news, friends. This is my lucky day. You remember that when I was rescued from the Golden Nugget my pockets were full of ore samples I had picked up as I was tunneling."
"Yes ... picked them up while you were delirious, didn't you?" Farquhar replied.
"Must have, I reckon. Well, you know how miners are always having pieces of quartz assayed. Colter took these to the man we employ. He's just learned that it is high-grade stuff."