er.

Colina drew her beautiful straight brows together. "You make me think
you simply want to get me off your hands," she said sullenly.

Gaviller shook his head. "You know I love to have you with me," he
said simply.

"Then consider me a fixture!" said Colina serenely. "This is my
country!" she went on enthusiastically. "It suits me. I like its
uglinesses and its hardships, too! I hated it in the city. Do you
know what they called me?--the wild Highlander!

"Up here everybody understands my wildness, and thinks none the worse
of me. It was different in the city--you've always lived in the north,
you old innocent--you don't know! Men, for instance, in society they
have a curious logic. They seem to think if a girl is natural she must
be bad! Sometimes they acted on that assumption--"

"What did I tell you!" cried her father. "Men are the same everywhere!"

"Well," said Colina, smiling to herself, "they didn't get very far.
And no man ever tried it twice. Up here--how different. I don't have
to think of such things."

"I have to think of settling you in life," said Gaviller gloomily.
"There is no one for you up here."

"I'm not bothering my head about that," said Colina. She went on with
a kind of splendid insolence: "Every man wants me. I'll choose one
when I'm ready. I can't see anything in men except as comrades. The
decent ones are timid with women, and the bold ones are--well--rather
beastly. I'm looking for a man who's brave and decent, too. If
there's no such thing--"

She rose from the table. Colina's was a body designed to fill a
riding-habit, and she wore one from morning till night. She was as
tall as a man of middle height, and her tawny hair piled on top of her
head made her seem taller.

"Well?" said Gaviller.

"Oh, I'll choose the handsomest beast I can find," she said, laughing
over her shoulder and escaping from the room before he could answer.

John Gaviller finished his egg with a frown. Colina had this trick of
breaking things off in the middle, and it irritated him. He had an
orderly mind.

CHAPTER IV.

THE MEETING.

Colina groomed her own horse, whistling like a boy. Saddling him, she
rode east along the trail by the river, with the fenced grain fields on
her right hand.

Beyond the fields she could gallop at will over the rolling, grassy
bottoms, among the patches of scrub and willow.

It was not an impressively beautiful scene--the river was ha