her voice and face--seemed as though I already knew her."

"She knew you, through what she had read of you. She warned me, in
that frank, charming way of hers, that you were a hero to her and I
must not mind if she worshiped you openly."

Blake laughed pleasedly. "Isn't she the greatest! And the way she
chums with me! Wonder if that is what makes Ashton so sore at me? The
idiot! Can't he see the difference?"

"Lovers always are blind," said Genevieve.

"I'm not," he rejoined, his eyes, as he gazed down into hers, as blue
and tender as Isobel's.

The young wife blushed deliciously and rewarded him with a kiss.

"But about Chuckie?" she returned to the previous question. "You were
going to tell me--"

"I am going to tell you something you will think is very fanciful--and
it is! Do you know why I am so taken with that girl? It's because
she reminds me of my sisters--what they might have grown to be!...
God!--" he bent over with his face in his shaking hands--"God! If only
they had gone any other way than--the way they did!"

"My poor dear boy!" soothed his wife, her hand on his downbent head.
"Let us trust that they are in a happier world, a world where sorrow
and pain--"

"If only I could believe that!" he groaned.

Genevieve waited a few moments and with quiet tactfulness sought to
divert him from his grief: "If Chuckie reminds you of them, Dear--"

"She might be either--only Mary, the older one, had dark brown eyes.
But Belle's were blue like Chuckie's."

"What a pure blue her eyes are--the sweet true girl! Why can't you
regard her as your sister, and--and give over further thought of this
irrigation project?"

Blake looked up, completely diverted. "You little schemer! So that's
what you've been working around to?"

"But why not?" she insisted.

"I'll tell you. It is because I am so fond of Chuckie that I am
determined to get water on Dry Mesa, if it is possible."

"But--"

"To make use of those waste waters," he explained; "to turn this dusty
semi-desert into a garden; and to benefit Chuckie by doubling the
value of her father's property."

"How could that be, when the farmers would divide up his range?"

"He owns five sections, Chuckie told me. What are they worth now? But
with water on them, even without a single tree planted, they would
sell as orchard land for more than all his herd; and he would still
have his cattle. He could sell them to the settlers for more than what
he now gets shippi