barking shrilly, before vanishing, with a whisk
of the tail, from sight. Stephen took so kindly to the little show, and
made such commonplace exclamations of pleasure, that Amy felt a sudden
relieved compunction and smiled upon him very graciously.

"They are not a bit like what I expected," he said; "but they are such
self-important, conceited little chaps that you can't help having a
fellow-feeling with them!"

"Hullo! There's a give-away!" Jack Hersey shouted; and he turned and
repeated the remark for the benefit of a buckboard in the rear. Amy
thought Jack very stupid and silly, and in her own heart, she promptly
ranged herself on the side of her young minister. There was nothing
subtle or elusive about her changes of mood, and Stephen profited by
each relenting. For a few blissful moments, accordingly, he now basked
in the full consciousness of her favor.

They continued for half an hour on the ranch road, rising and dipping
from point to point, yet mounting always higher above the great plain
below. There the prairie stretched away, a hundred miles to the East and
South, with never a lake nor a forest to catch the light, with not a
cloud in the sky to cast a shadow. Yet over the broad, undulating
expanse were lines and patches of varying color, changing and wavering
from moment to moment, like mystic currents and eddies upon a heaving,
tide-swept sea. Amy watched her companion furtively, ready to take
umbrage at any lack of proper appreciation on his part; for this was
what she liked best in all Colorado, this vast, mysterious prairie sea.
Yet when she saw by Stephen's face that the spell had touched him too,
when she noted the rapt gaze he sent forth, as he left his horse to
choose his own way, she felt annoyed, unreasoningly, perversely annoyed.
Somehow his look was too rapt, he was taking it too solemnly, he was too
much in earnest! She had a longing to touch up her horse and gallop off
to some spot where she might be unmolested, where she might think her
own thoughts and receive her own impressions without seeing them
accentuated, exaggerated in another person. There had never been any one
before who seemed to feel just as she did about that view, and somehow
she resented this intrusion upon what seemed like her own preserve.

Of course there was but one explanation of all this high-strung
sensitiveness in a healthy, natural girl like Amy Lovejoy. She had made
a mistake, and she was finding it out. In thos