t to say that at all.

Tall and gaunt and gray and old; lines etched deep ground his bitter
mouth; pale with the tragic prison pallor; looking out at the world
with the somber eyes of one who has suffered most cruelly,--Aleck
Douglas put out his thin, shaking arms and held her close. He did not
say anything at all; and the kiss she asked for he laid softly upon her
hair.

Lite stood in the doorway and looked at the two of them for a moment.
"I'm going down to see about--things. I'll be back in a little while.
And, Jean, will you be ready?"

Jean looked up at him understandingly, and with a certain shyness in
her eyes. "If it's all right with dad," she told him, "I'll be ready."

"Lite's a man!" Aleck stated unsmilingly, with a trace of that apathy
which had hurt Jean so in the warden's office. "I'm glad you'll have
him to take care of you, Jean."

So Lite closed the door softly and went away and left those two alone.

In a very few words I can tell you the rest. There were a few things
to adjust, and a few arrangements to make. The greatest adjustment,
perhaps, was when Jean begged off from that contract with the Great
Western Company. Dewitt did not want to let her go, but he had read a
marked article in a Montana paper that Lite mailed to him in advance of
their return, and he realized that some things are greater even than
the needs of a motion-picture company. He was very nice, therefore, to
Jean. He told her by all means to consider herself free to give her
time wholly to her father--and her husband. He also congratulated Lite
in terms that made Jean blush and beat a hurried retreat from his
office, and that made Lite grin all the way to the hotel. So the
public lost Jean of the Lazy A almost as soon as it had learned to
welcome her.

Then there was Pard, that had to leave the little buckskin and take
that nerve-racking trip back to the Lazy A. Lite attended to that with
perfect calm and a good deal of inner elation. So that detail was soon
adjusted.

At the Lazy A there was a great deal to do before the traces of its
tragedy were wiped out. We'll have to leave them doing that work,
which was only a matter of time, after all, and not nearly so hard to
accomplish as their attempts to wipe out from Aleck's soul the black
scar of those three years. I think, on the whole, we shall leave them
doing that work, too. As much as human love and happiness could do
toward wiping out the bitterness t