rtha rode was prancing and foaming, eager for a renewal
of the race, and Ben, seeing it, cried out: "Shall we go round by the
hanging rock?"

"I'm willing!" answered Bertha, her eyes shining with excitement.

Alice shook her head. "I think I'll let you young things go your own
gait, and I'll poke along back towards home."

Ben rode near her, searching her face anxiously. "You're not tired--are
you, sweetness?"

"No, but I would be if I took that big circuit. But never mind me, I
like to poke."

"Very well," he answered, quite relieved, "we'll meet you at the
bridge." And off they dashed with furious clatter, leaving her to slowly
retrace her lonely way, feeling very tired, very old, and very sad.

Bertha was perfectly, perilously happy. It was almost her first escape
from the brooding care and weight of Haney's presence. She felt as she
used to feel when speeding away on swift gallop to the ranch with some
companion as care-free as herself. Since that fateful day when her
mother fell ill and Marshall Haney asked her to marry him, she had not
been permitted an hour's holiday. Even when absent from her husband her
mind carried an inescapable picture of his loneliness and helplessness,
and no complete relaxation had come with her temporary freedom. This
day, this hour, she was suddenly free from care, from pain, from all
uneasiness.

She considered this feeling due to the saddle and to the clear air of
the morning. "I will ride every day," she declared to Ben, with shining
face, as they drew their horses to a walk. "I don't know when I've
enjoyed a ride so much. I can't see why I haven't been out before. I
used to ride a good lot; lately I've dropped it."

"We'll call for you every morning," he replied. "As Alice gets stronger,
we can go up into the canons and take long rides."

"I'll tell you what we'll do," she said; "we'll let her ride in the cart
with the Captain, and take our dinner, and we'll all go up the North
Canon some day, and eat picnic dinner there."

"Good idea," he said, accepting her disposition of Alice without even
mental dissent. "That will be jolly fun."

They planned this and other excursions, with no sense of leaving any one
behind or of cutting across conventional boundaries. Their native
honesty and innocence of any ill intention prevented even a suspicion of
danger, and by the time they joined Alice at the bridge they were on
terms of intimacy and good-fellowship which seemed to rise f