m from one of the very oldest families in
Hinsdale County, Colorado." The girl applauded him with her eyes, and
the incident was closed with a word of mild gratification from the old
lady. She was pleased to observe that he felt a family pride, even
though any county in Colorado was, of course, beyond consideration.

Their favorite walk home from the golf links led them through a
churchyard, and here they often rested in the cool of the afternoon; not
in the new part where monument and mound were obtrusively recent, but
up the hill from these, where death was so ancient as to be touched
with the grace of the antique. Here, in a pleasant gloom of oak shade,
cypress and elm, they loitered among the drab stones that headed mounds
worn down and overgrown with sweetbrier, wild rose, and matted grass;
and here Mrs. Laithe sometimes joined them for the homeward stroll,
walking too much, Ewing thought, like one who had risen from the
forgotten multitude under foot. Yet, when he spoke of her health she
always responded with her gay assurances, and seemed, indeed, to be more
concerned about his welfare than her own. He had not been able to talk
to her freely. There was so much about Teevan that he felt she would not
understand. Besides, he could not speak to her about Teevan.

At the end of the first week he had written to Teevan to say that he
must talk with him. The little man had replied from his favorite sea
place, naming a day when he would be back in town.

The prospect depressed Ewing anew. It had been easy to lie on his back
in a field, nettled by disgust with himself, and frame speeches of
self-mastery. But reflection had brought him doubt. The speeches would
have to be made, and yet, in a way, he was Teevan's property; Teevan had
invested money in him. This added to his depression. And this was why
the girl reported him to her sister as a youth joyful in odd moments of
forgetting, but sunk in some black despair when he remembered; a young
man she could not at all understand. And Mrs. Laithe, puzzling over his
trouble, divining that Teevan would somehow be at the bottom of it,
determined on a move to aid him, a move that would take her once more to
Teevan himself. She had sought him the night after her talk with
Sydenham, but the interview had come to nothing. Teevan had been so
plausibly solicitous about Ewing's success that she had found herself
unready to tax him with a knowledge of Ewing's identity, or with motives