The fellow was getting full pretty fast and was down to the garrulous stage, but he began again:
"Dear Husband,—I am sorry to hear that you have been so unfortunate, but don't get discouraged. I know you will make a good miner if you stick to it long enough. Don't worry about me. I have rented the front room to a very nice man for fifteen dollars a week. The papers here are full of a gold strike in Siberia, just across Bering Sea from where you are. If you don't find something during the next two years, why not try it over there for a couple?"
"That's what I call a persevering woman," said Eckert, solemnly.
"She's a business woman, too," said the husband. "All I ever got for that room was seven-fifty a week."
It seems I'd missed Montague at the store, but when the crowd came out Ollie Marceau found him away in at the back, having gone there to be alone with his letters. She saw the utter abandon and grief in his pose, and the tears came to her eyes. Impulsively she went up and laid her hand on his bowed head. She had followed the frontier enough to know the signs.
"Oh, Mr. Prosser," she said, "I'm so sorry! Is it the little mother?"
"Yes," he answered, without moving.
"Not—not—" she hesitated.
"I don't know. The letters are up to the middle of December, and she was very sick."
Then, with the quick sentiment of her kind, the girl spoke to him, forgetting herself, her life, his prejudice, everything except the lonely little gray woman off there who had waited and longed just as such another had waited and longed for her, and, inasmuch as Ollie had suffered before as this boy suffered now, in her words there was a sweet sympathy and a perfect understanding.