ags picking crusts out of the garbage
barrels along a back lane! I brought her back with me. Gave her a
week's soak in the bath house--" he paused as if reflecting, "and that
it seems was foundation enough for the hog-wash that appeared in one of
the papers here. Suppose we take a walk as we discuss old days; they
were pretty wild days for discussion before a girl, who didn't know her
dad before she was born."

And Eleanor went out on the Ranch House piazza off her room, while the
two frontiersmen strolled down the river. How different her outlook on
life was from two months before when reference to Calamity had called
up mingled fury and horror. Now that she understood, anything in this
Western Country might be possible, and understandable, and explainable.
She had his hurried pencil note where she could feel it, under her
locket; only the locket was outside above; and the fly leaf of that
field book was inside next. "Dick (nth)," he had signed himself; and
he had not come down. She could see the dark shadowy Ridge from her
piazza chair, and hear the subdued laughter and lipping of the waters,
and he was there--not a half hour's walk away--and he had not come.
There was a full moon. She could see its silver sheen on the River, on
the tremulous poplar leaves, sifting through the pine needles and in
opal wings round the far luminous cross of snow on the mountain. The
night hawks and the swallows dipped and darted and cut the air with
humming wings; and once the wire gate squeaked to some one entering.
Eleanor sprang up with her heart beating so that she could not speak;
but it was only a white hatted youth in light gray flannels asking
Calamity at the basement door "when MacDonald would be back." Did
Eleanor imagine it; or did the citified young person in the gray
flannels with the red necktie look up towards her hesitatingly, with
the suggestion of an ingratiating smile in the pale blue eyes, a
suggestion which she could not define but which somehow infuriated her?
Poor pale anaemic youth! He was not used to having his waiting smiles
met by the blaze of red fury that flashed to her eyes.

"Calamity, if that person wants anything, tell him to go out to the
bunkhouse and see the foreman."

Then, she sank back in her chair both glad and sorry in one breath that
Wayland had not been there. She shut her eyes to drink again of the
memories that had sustained her all these weeks; and felt the lift and
fall of th