rl, and they
set themselves to find out who she was. They did not suspect that he
sought the Major's niece.

It was a keen delight to see her, even at that distance. To get one look
from her, or to see her eyelashes fall over her brown eyes, paid him for
all his trouble, and yet it left him hungrier at heart than before.

Sometimes he got seated in such wise that he could see the fine line of
her cheek and chin. He noticed also her growing color. The free life she
lived in the face of the mountain winds was doing her good.

Sometimes he went at night to the song service, and his rides home alone
on the plain, with the shadowy mountains over there massed in the
starlit sky, were most wonderful experiences.

As he rose and fell on his broncho's steady gallop, he took off his hat
to let the wind stir his hair. Riding thus, exalted thus, one night he
shaped a desperate resolution. He determined to call on her just as he
used to visit the girls at Viroqua with whom he was on the same intimacy
of footing.

He was as good as any class. He was not as good as she was, for he
lacked her sweetness and purity of heart, but merely the fact that she
lived in a great house and wore beautiful garments, did not exclude him
from calling upon her.

IV.

But week after week went by without his daring to make his resolution
good. He determined many times to ask permission to call, but somehow he
never did.

He seemed to see her rather less than at first; and, on her part, there
was a change. She seemed to have lost her first eager and frank
curiosity about him, and did not always smile now when she met him.

Then, again, he could not in working dress ask to call; it would seem so
incongruous to stand before her to make such a request covered with
perspiration and dust. It was hard to be dignified under such
circumstances; he must be washed and dressed properly.

In the meantime, the men had discovered how matters stood, and some of
them made very free with the whole situation. Two of them especially
hated him.

These two men had drifted to the farm from the mines somewhere, and were
rough, hard characters. They would have come to blows with him, only
they knew something of the power lying coiled in his long arms.

One day he overheard one of the men speaking of Edith, and his tone
stopped the blood in Arthur's heart. When he walked among the group of
men his face was white and set.

"You take that back!" he said in a low