plain and the hazy blue sweep of the mountains, and
had come suddenly into the poetic mood. She had even caught a
phrase,--"The lazy line of the watchful hills," it was,--and she was
trying to fit it into a verse, and to find something beside "rills"
that would rhyme with "hills."

She followed the path absent-mindedly to where she would have to turn
at the corner of the kitchen and go around to the door of her own room;
and until she came to the turn she did not realize what was jarring
vaguely and yet insistently upon her mood. Then she knew; and she
stopped full and stared down at the loose sand just before the warped
kitchen steps. There were footprints in the path,--alien footprints;
and they pointed toward that forbidden door into the kitchen of
gruesome memory. Jean looked up frowning, and saw that the door had
been opened and closed again carelessly. And upon the top step, strange
feet had pressed a little caked earth carried from the trail where she
stood. There were the small-heeled, pointed prints of a woman's foot,
and there were the larger tracks of a man,--a man of the town.

Jean stood with her quirt dangling loosely from her wrist and glanced
back toward the stables and down the coulee. She completely forgot
that she wanted a rhyme for "hills." What were towns people doing
here? And how did they get here? They had not ridden up the coulee;
there were no tracks through the gate; and besides, these were not the
prints of riding-boots.

She twitched her shoulders and went around to the door leading into her
own room. The door stood wide open when it should have been closed.
Inside there were evidences of curious inspection. She went hot with
an unreasoning anger when she saw the wide-open door into the kitchen;
first of all she went over and closed that door, her lips pressed
tightly together. To her it was as though some wanton hand had forced
up the lid of a coffin where slept her dead. She stood with her back
against the door and looked around the room, breathing quickly. She
felt the woman's foolish amusement at the old cradle with the rag doll
tucked under the patchwork quilt, and at her pitiful attempts at
adorning the tawdry walls. Without having seen more than the prints of
her shoes in the path, Jean hated the woman who had blundered in here
and had looked and laughed. She hated the man who had come with the
woman.

She went over to her desk and stood staring at the litter. A c