d make my
peace with Uncle Homer, so they could see something of me. (If I had told
her how easy it was to make peace with "Uncle Homer," and how he had
turned me down, she might not have been quite so sure that it was all my
bull-headedness.) She complained that Gertrude was engaged to one of the
fellows, and so was awfully stupid; and Beryl might as well be--

I tore up the letter just there, and the wind, which was howling that day,
caught the pieces and took them over into North Dakota; so I don't know
what else Edith may have had to tell me. I'd read enough to put me in a
mighty nasty temper at any rate, so I suppose its purpose was
accomplished. Edith is like all the rest: If she can say anything to make
a man uncomfortable she'll do it, every time.

This day, I remember, I went mooning along, thinking hard things about the
world in general, and my little corner of it in particular. The country
was beginning to irritate me, and I knew that if something didn't break
loose pretty soon I'd be off somewhere. Riding over to little buttes, and
not meeting a soul on the way or seeing anything but a bare rock when you
get there, grows monotonous in time, and rather gets on the nerves of a
fellow.

When I came close up to the butte, however, I saw a flutter of skirts on
the pinnacle, and it made a difference in my gait; I went up all out of
breath, scrambling as if my life hung on a few seconds, and calling myself
a different kind of fool for every step I took. I kept assuring myself,
over and over, that it was only Edith, and that there was no need to get
excited about it. But all the while I knew, down deep down in the
thumping chest of me, that it wasn't Edith. Edith couldn't make all that
disturbance in my circulatory system, not in a thousand years.

She was sitting on the same rock, and she was dressed in the same adorable
riding outfit with a blue wisp of veil wound somehow on her gray felt hat,
and the same blue roan was dozing, with dragging bridle-reins, a few rods
down the other side of the peak. She was sketching so industriously that
she never heard me coming until I stood right at her elbow.

It might have been the first time over again, except that my mental
attitude toward her had changed a lot.

"That's better; I can see now what you're trying to draw," I said, looking
down over her shoulder--not at the sketch; it might have been a sea view,
for all I knew--but at the pink curve of her cheek, which wa