ped, with
what he intended as a worldly careless air. He'd never have dared that
a week earlier; he had always been too conscious until that moment of a
certain unapproachability, a transcendent daintiness, audacious and the
reverse from fragile, which nevertheless had kept him at arms' length.
But with his father's words in his ears--dangerous!--tainted!--he
managed it easily.

"Of course we couldn't arrange it here in town, where we're known--"

"Arrange what?"

"Well, I thought maybe--" Her calmness, hers by right of breeding,
lamed him again and angered him to coarse effrontery.

"I don't suppose there's many in town now who'd care to take a chance--"

"A chance on what?"

"Well, on marrying you. This is a pretty conservative community. But
I thought if we could find a place quietly, not too far away, where
we--"

She rang a bell and summoned a butler who was also cook, and coachman
too.

"Show Mr. Ostermoor out," she directed, calm still. But the terms of
that order were only out of regard for the extreme age of the servitor.
He would attempt to obey her she knew; had he been younger she would
have directed that Mr. Ostermoor be thrown out.

A week later the estate was settled up. Naturally Ostermoor's father,
who was president of the local bank, knew that there wasn't going to be
any estate, yet the total of her father's paper must have staggered
him. I hope so. And when she was proved to be practically penniless,
immediately they all felt that they had evened their score with her.
For what? Oh, for driving so sweet and cool along a dusty,
maple-shaded main street, as pleasant and courteous to ordinary
tradespeople as she was to better folk.

Then, in a surprisingly short while, whenever somebody happened to
mention her and wonder where she had gone, they found that they had
already started to forget her.

"Somewhere West. I did hear the name of the place. But I can't
remember it."

They were above reproach,--in their geography. She had gone somewhere
west, and sometimes I am not sure that there isn't a heartache in the
reason for her going.

Romance was in her hungry heart; such romance as the Sunday-groomed
youths who frequented the house on the hill might never satisfy. She'd
read books, all sorts of books, but one of the plains she loved. In it
a somewhat saturnine horseman, a son of the sage-brush, unlettered but
tutored much by life, had wooed and won a prim little schoolmistr