." Halson turned to him politely.

"Not at all. I'd rather hear your guess, if you know Braybridge better
than I," Wanhope said.

"Well," Halson compromised, "perhaps I've known him longer." He asked,
with an effect of coming to business: "Where were you?"

"Tell him, Rulledge," Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked
nothing better. He told him, in detail, all we knew from any source,
down to the moment of Wanhope's arrested conjecture.

"He did leave you at an anxious point, didn't he?" Halson smiled to the
rest of us at Rulledge's expense, and then said: "Well, I think I can
help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?"

"By sight, Minver does," Rulledge answered for us. "Wants to paint her."

"Of course," Halson said, with intelligence. "But I doubt if he'd find
her as paintable as she looks, at first. She's beautiful, but her charm
is spiritual."

"Sometimes we try for that," the painter interposed.

"And sometimes you get it. But you'll allow it's difficult. That's all I
meant. I've known her--let me see--for twelve years, at least; ever
since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was
bringing her up on the ranch. Her aunt came along by and by and took her
to Europe--mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was
always homesick for the ranch; she pined for it; and after they had kept
her in Germany three or four years they let her come back and run wild
again--wild as a flower does, or a vine, not a domesticated animal."

"Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge."

"Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver," Halson said,
almost austerely. "Her father died two years ago, and then she _had_ to
come East, for her aunt simply _wouldn't_ live on the ranch. She brought
her on here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the
girl didn't take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the
start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the
ranch."

"She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those
conventional people."

Halson laughed at Minver's thrust, and went on amiably: "I don't suppose
that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any
man--or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you've done, that it was
his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn't
that it?"

Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a n