now I am. What I want to say is this. I believe he would have
married Esther McLean if it hadn't been for one thing. He fell
desperately in love with Phyllis afterward. The odd thing is that she
loves him, too. They didn't dare to be above-board about it on account
of Uncle James. They treated him shabbily, of course. I don't deny
that."

"You can hardly deny that," Kirby agreed.

"But, damn it, one swallow doesn't make a summer. You've seen the
worst side of him all the way through."

"I dare say I have." Kirby let his hand fall on the well-tailored
shoulder of his cousin. "But I haven't seen the worst side of his
brother Jack. He's a good scout. Come up to Wyoming this fall an'
we'll go huntin' up in the Jackson Hole country. What say?"

"Nothing I'd like better," answered Jack promptly.

"We'll arrange a date later. Just now I've got to beat it. Goin'
drivin' with a lady."

Jack scored for once. "_She's_ a good scout, too."

"If she isn't, I'll say there never was one," his cousin assented.

CHAPTER XLII

THE NEW WORLD

Kirby took his lady love driving in a rented flivver. It was a
Colorado night, with a young moon looking down through the cool, rare
atmosphere found only in the Rockies. He drove her through the city to
Berkeley and up the hill to Inspiration Point.

They talked only in intermittent snatches. Rose had the gift of
comradeship. Her tongue never rattled. With Kirby she did not need to
make talk. They had always understood each other without words.

But to-night their silences were filled with new and awkward
significances. She guessed that an emotional crisis was at hand. With
all her heart she welcomed and shrank from it. For she knew that after
to-night life could never be the same to her. It might be fuller,
deeper, happier, but it could not hold for her the freedom she had
guarded and cherished.

At the summit he killed the engine. They looked across the valley to
the hills dimmed by night's velvet dusk.

"We're through with all that back there," he said, and she knew he
meant the tangled trails of the past weeks into which their fate had
led them. "We don't have to keep our minds full of suspicions an' try
to find out things in mean, secret ways. There, in front of us, is
God's world, waitin' for you an' me, Rose."

Though she had expected it, she could not escape a sense of suddenly
stilled pulses followed by a clamor of beating blood. She qui