to earn this luxury."

"Doing nothing! My God, you've made Mart Haney over new. You've
converted him--as they say, you've redeemed him. Let me tell you
something, little sister, Mart worships you. It does him good just to
_see_ you. You don't expect the moon to fry bacon, do you? Stars don't
run pumps! Mart is satisfied. Every time you speak to him or pass by him
he gets happy all the way through--I know, for I feel just the same."

There was something in his eloquence that went to the heart of the
dreaming girl. If any one in her world was to be trusted it was this
ugly little man, who never presumed to ask even a smile for himself, and
whose unswerving loyalty to Mart made her own flight a base and cruel
act; and yet even as he pleaded his face faded and she fancied herself
stepping from the train in Sibley, unnoticed by even the hackmen, who
used to bring the humbler passengers of each train to the door of the
Golden Eagle Hotel.

She walked up the sidewalk, surprised to find it changed to brick. The
hotel was gone, and in its place stood a saloon marked, "Haney's Place."
This hardened her heart again. "That settles it!" she said, bitterly.
"He's gone back to his old business."

The road out to the ranch seemed very long and hot, but she had no
money, not a cent left with which to hire a carriage, and she kept
saying to herself: "If Mart knew this, he'd send Lucius and the machine.
I reckon he'd be sorry to see me walking in this dust. It's a good thing
I have my old brown dress on." She passed lovingly, regretfully over the
splendid gowns which hung in her wardrobe. "What will become of them?"
she asked. "Fan can't wear them." This called up a vision of Fan and her
eldest daughter, sweeping about in her splendor, her opera-cloak only
half encompassing the mother, while the girl swished over the floor in
the gown she had worn at her last dinner in the East. She laughed and
cried at the same time--it was painful to see them thus abused.

Then she seemed suddenly to enter the grove of twisted, hag-like cedars
which stood upon the mesa back of the ranch-house. "By-and-by I will
look like this," she dreamed, and laid her hand on one that was ragged
and gnarled and gray with a thousand years of sun and wind, and even as
she stood there, with the old crones moaning round her, Ben suddenly
confronted her.

Her first impulse was for flight, so sad and bitter was his face. She
began to pity him. His boyhood seemed to ha