e had kept his eyes on the portrait while he spoke. He stopped abruptly
now, turning to the listening woman, searching her face with new signs
of confusion.

"I--I didn't know I was telling you all that."

She did not answer at once.

"And you came here after that?" she said at last.

"Yes; my father found this place. He wanted to be alone. I think he
began to die when my mother went. He couldn't live without her. He
taught me what he could, about books and pictures, but I couldn't have
been much to him. I think it hurt him that I looked like her--he said I
looked like her. He worked on that portrait to the very last, even on
the morning of the day he died."

"What was your father's name?"

"Gilbert Denham Ewing. I was named for him."

"And your mother's name before marriage was----"

"I'm ashamed that I never knew. It must have been spoken often, but I
was so young; it never stayed in my mind. And a little while before he
died my father burned all his letters and papers. I've wondered about
their life long ago before I came, but I think my father meant me not to
know. He had some reason."

"I am glad you have told me all you did know," she said.

"But you have made _me_ glad," he assured her, returning to his livelier
manner.

"Your mother's first name"--she asked--"what did your father call her?"

"Oh, that--Katharine. He called her Kitty."

"Kitty!" She repeated it after him, softly, as if she spoke it in
compassion to the portrait.

"But see," he continued, "it's late. Stay and eat with us and I'll take
you back by moonlight. I've ordered a fine, big, silver moon to be set
up in the sky at seven, and Ben is already getting supper."

He pulled aside the blanket portiere, and through the doorway she could
see the saturnine one--a man fashioned for tragedies, for deeds of
desperate hazard--incongruously busied with a pan of soda biscuits and a
hissing broiler.

When they rode back to Bar-7 the hills were struck to silver by the
moon. They were companionably silent for most of the ride, though the
youth from time to time, when the trail narrowed to put him in the rear,
crooned stray bits of a song with which Ben Crider had favored them
while he prepared the evening meal. The lines Mrs Laithe remembered
were:

"Take back your gold, for gold it cannot buy me;
Make me your wife, 'tis all I ask of you."

When they parted she said, "You must think about leaving here. It's time
you rode out in