The next morning Corliss was knocked out of a late bed by Bash, one of Jacob Welse's Indians.

He was the bearer of a brief little note from Frona, which contained a request for the mining engineer to come and see her at his first opportunity.

That was all that was said, and he pondered over it deeply.

What did she wish to say to him?
She was still such an unknown quantity,--and never so much as now in the light of the day before,--that he could not guess.

Did she desire to give him his dismissal on a definite, well-understood basis?
To take advantage of her sex and further humiliate him?
To tell him what she thought of him in coolly considered, cold-measured terms?
Or was she penitently striving to make amends for the unmerited harshness she had dealt him?
There was neither contrition nor anger in the note, no clew, nothing save a formally worded desire to see him.
So it was in a rather unsettled and curious frame of mind that he walked in upon her as the last hour of the morning drew to a close.