transactions, Jerry
Swaim would have felt uncomfortable, even though she knew her aunt too
well to be deceived by any such demonstration.

"Geraldine Swaim, what are you saying?" Mrs. Darby demanded, in a hard,
even voice. Something in her manner and face could always hold even the
brave-spirited in frightened awe of her.

Eugene Wellington lost courage to go on, and the same thing came again
that Jerry Swaim had twice seen on his face in the rose-arbor this
evening. The two were looking straight at the girl now. The firelight
played with the golden glory of her hair and deepened the rose hue of
her round cheeks. The dark-blue eyes seemed almost black, with a gleam
in their depths that meant trouble, and there was a strength in the low
voice as Jerry went on:

"I'm talking about what I know, Aunt Jerry. All there is of my heritage
from my father is a 'claim,' they call it, at New Eden, in the Sage
Brush Valley in Kansas; twelve hundred acres. I'm going out there to
manage it myself and support myself on an income of my own."

For a long minute Jerusha Darby looked steadily at her niece, her own
face as hard and impenetrable as if it were carven out of flint. Then
she said, sharply:

"Where did you find out all this?"

"It is all in a document here that I found in the rose-arbor this
afternoon," the girl replied. "Aunt Jerry, I must use what is mine. I
wouldn't be a Swaim if I didn't."

"You won't stay there two weeks." Mrs. Darby fairly clicked out the
words. Her face was very pale and something like real fright looked
through her eyes as she took the paper from her niece's hand.

"And then?" Jerry inquired, demurely.

"And then you will come back here where you belong and live as you
always have lived, in comfort."

"And if I do not come?"

Jerusha Darby's face was not pleasant to see just then. The firelight
that made the girl more winsomely pretty seemed to throw into relief all
the hard lines of a countenance which selfishness and stubbornness and a
dictatorial will had graven there.

"Jerry Swaim, you are building up a wild, adventurous dream. You are
Lesa Swaim over and over. You want a lark, that's what you want. And
it's you who have put Eugene up to his notions of a career and all that.
Listen to me. Nothing talks in this world like money. That you have to
have for your way of living, and that he's got to have if he wants to be
what he should be. Well, go on out to Kansas. You know more of that