just
beyond a daintily appointed dinner-table adorned with fresh
flowers,--all at forty miles an hour,--she had leisure to review her
situation and be astonished. Bustling cities shot past them,--or seemed
to shoot,--beautifully kept country-seats, shabby suburbs where goats
and pigs mounted guard over shanties and cabbage-beds, great tracts of
wild forest, factory towns black with smoke, rivers winding between blue
hill ridges, prairie-like expanses so overgrown with wild-flowers that
they looked all pink or all blue,--everything by turns and nothing long.
It seemed the sequence of the unexpected, a succession of rapidly
changing surprises, for which it was impossible to prepare beforehand.

"I shall never learn to understand it," thought poor perplexed Imogen.

CHAPTER IV.

IN THE HIGH VALLEY.

MEANWHILE, as the "Limited" bore the young English travellers on their
western way, a good deal of preparation was going on for their benefit
in that special nook of the Rocky mountains toward which their course
was directed. It was one of those clear-cut, jewel-like mornings which
seem peculiar to Colorado, with dazzling gold sunshine, a cloudless sky
of deep sapphire blue, and air which had touched the mountain snows
somewhere in its nightly blowing, and still carried on its wings the
cool pure zest of the contact.

Hours were generally early in the High Valley, but to-day they were a
little earlier than usual, for every one had a sense of much to be done.
Clover Templestowe did not always get up to administer to her husband
and brother-in-law their "stirrup-cup" of coffee; but this morning she
was prompt at her post, and after watching them ride up the valley, and
standing for a moment at the open door for a breath of the scented wind,
she seated herself at her sewing-machine. A steady whirring hum
presently filled the room, rising to the floor above and quickening the
movements there. Elsie, running rapidly downstairs half an hour later,
found her sister with quite a pile of little cheese-cloth squares and
oblongs folded on the table near her.

"Dear me! are those the Youngs' curtains you are doing?" she asked. "I
fully meant to get down early and finish my half. That wretched little
Phillida elected to wake up and demand ''tories' from one o'clock till a
quarter past two. 'Hence these tears.' I overslept myself without
knowing it."

Phillida was Elsie's little girl, two years and a half old now, and Dr.
C