h
and gritty. He turned himself round and sat with his back to the
mountains, looking eastward, his hands clasping one knee. He was glad
the prairie was broken up into mounds and hillocks over there, and had
not the look of the sea that it took on from some points of view. There
was a group of pines off to the left; he had been too preoccupied to
observe them as he came along the road,--strangely enough too, for a
group of trees is an unusual sight out on the prairie. What a lot of
trees there were in the East though, and how wofully he had come to
grief among them up there on the North Shore! Only a year ago it had
happened, only a year ago, in the fragrant New England June! His married
sister had had Dorothy and himself visiting her at the same time. Well,
Fanny had done her best for him, though it was no good. He wondered, in
passing, how it happened that a fellow could come to care more for
anybody else than for a sister like Fanny!

He had found Dorothy sitting in perfect idleness under a big pine-tree
that lovely June morning. There were robins hopping about the lawn; the
voices of his sister's children came, shrill and sweet, calling to one
another as they dug in the garden by the house. The tide was coming in;
he could hear it break against the rocks over yonder, while the far
stretches of sea glimmered softly in the sunshine. Dorothy looked so
sweet and beneficent as she sat under the big pine-tree in the summer
sunshine, that all his misgivings vanished. Before he knew what he was
about he had "asked her."

And here the little drama was blurred and muffled in his memory. He
wondered, as he clasped his knees and studied the tops of the
pine-trees, how he had put the question; whether he had perhaps put it
wrong. He could not recall a word he had said; but her words in reply
fell as distinct on his ear, as the note of the meadow-lark, down there
by the roadside. How the note of the meadow-lark shot a thrill through
the thin Colorado air,--informed with a soul the dazzling day! How
cruelly sweet Dorothy's voice had been, as she said:

"No, Harry, I couldn't!"

It had made him so angry that he hardly knew how deep his hurt was.

"You have no right to say no!" he had heard himself say.

He could not remember whether that was immediately, or after an interval
of discussion. She had stood up and turned away, not deigning to reply.
And then the memory of that talk at the ball had struck him like a blow.

"Wait