If the experience of the Irish girl had
been small, her imagination had none the less gone questing beyond the
narrow bars of her life upon amazing adventure. She listened with
glowing eyes to the strange tales this man of magnificent horizons had
to tell. Never before had she come into contact with any one like him.
The others too succumbed to his charm. He dominated that little
dining-room because he was a sixty-horse-power dynamo. For all his bulk
he was as lean as a panther and as sinewy. There was virility in the
very economy of his motions, in the reticence of his speech. Not even
a fool could have read weakness there. When he followed Sheba into the
living-room, power trod in his long, easy stride.
Paget was superintendent of the Lucky Strike, a mine owned principally
by Macdonald. The two talked business for a few minutes over their
cigars, but Diane interrupted gayly to bring them back into the circle.
Adroitly she started Macdonald on the account of a rescue of two men
lost in a blizzard the year before. He had the gift of dramatizing his
story, of selecting only effective details. There was no suggestion of
boasting. If he happened to be the hero of any of his stories the fact
was of no importance to him.
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