, Clover? A hundred years? I should think it would take at
least as long as that."

"Lionel's a dear fellow. We are all very fond of him."

"I can understand your being fond of _him_ easily enough. Imogen! what a
name for just that kind of girl. 'Image' it ought to be. What a figure
of fun she was in that awful blue gown!"

The two weeks of Rose's visit sped only too rapidly. There was so much
that they wanted to show her, and there were so many people whom they
wanted her to see, and so many people who, as soon as they saw her,
became urgent that she should do this and that with them, that life soon
became a tangle of impossibilities. Rose was one of those charmers that
cannot be hid. She had been a belle all her days, and she would be so
till she died of old age, as Elsie told her. Her friends of the High
Valley gloried in her success; but all the time they had a private
longing to keep her more to themselves, as one retires with two or three
to enjoy a choice dainty of which there is not enough to go round in a
larger company. They took her to the Cheyenne Canyons and the top of
Pike's Peak; they carried her over the Marshall Pass and to many smaller
places less known to fame, but no less charming in their way.
Invitations poured in from St. Helen's, to lunch, to dinner, to
afternoon teas; but of these Rose would none. She could lunch and dine
in Boston, she declared, but she might never come to Colorado again, and
what she thirsted for was canyons, and not less than one a day would
content her insatiable appetite for them.

But though she would not go to St. Helen's, St. Helen's in a measure
came to her. Marian Chase and Alice made their promised visit; Dr. and
Mrs. Hope came out more than once, and Phil continually; while smart
Bostonians whom Clover had never heard of turned up at Canyon Creek and
the Ute Valley and drove over to call, having heard that Mrs. Deniston
Browne was staying there. The High Valley became used to the roll of
wheels and the tramp of horses' feet, and for the moment seemed a
sociable, accessible sort of place to which it was a matter of course
that people should repair. It was oddly different from the customary
order of things, but the change was enlivening, and everybody enjoyed it
with one exception.

This exception was Imogen Young. She was urged to join some of the
excursions made by her friends below, but on one excuse or another she
refused. She felt shy and left out where all t