r the sake of the lady:
outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for
the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate
on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel"
would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour;
while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went East for the winter
lighter as to purse, wiser as to the ways of paying for pleasure.
Altogether, it was not surprising her father kept apart from "the
English Colony," Eleanor reflected. She passed out to the piazza
spanning all sides of the ranch house.

It was a sun-bathed, sun-kissed, sun-fused world. The River flowed
liquid silver jubilant and singing. The morning mists rolled up
primrose spangled with jewels, while over all lay such light as
hypnotized the senses into a sort of dazzled dream world. Ashes of
roses! There were no ashes here. It was the rose, itself; a world
veiled in gold mist, wind-blown, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of
fire edging every ridge. The sheep browsing in the Valley, the
fleece-clouds herding mid the winds of the upper peaks, you hardly knew
which shone whiter. The burnished mountain with its silver cross and
wings of light, opal about the peaks, melting in fading lines about the
base, with the middle distances lost in gashed purple shadows, might
have been a thing of airy fancy. So might the dark forested Ridge
where the evergreens stood sentinels among wisps of cloud. And
everywhere, all pervasive, sifting through the shadows of silvered pine
needles and trembling poplars, permeated the cinnamon smell of the
barky forest world, resinous of balsam, spicy with the tang of life.

She could see the mountain streams where they laughed down the Ridge in
wind-tattered spray. With the glass, too, she could see a little blue
wreath of man-made smoke curling up from the evergreens; and waves of
happiness, absurd warm glowing happiness, broke over her, the sheer
gladness of being alive. Whatever sinister thing kept her father
apart, it was here she belonged--she knew it now--to the great spacious
life-stimulating West; to the world resinous with imprisoned sunbeams;
not to the lands of sky shut out by twenty story roofs and pea-soup
fogs and sickly anaemic views of life. Life was good. She drank of it
and called it good as in creation's prime.

Once she called Central up on the telephone. Central answered that the
R