ered as were other girls.
Gliding servants anticipated her wishes and carried them out. But with
it all there was a growing restlessness within her,--a vague
dissatisfaction for which she could not account. She groped for an
answer but the analysis could not be expressed or definitely cleared in
her mind.

She sat in the Colton library waiting for Deane to come and take her to
a lakeside clubhouse for the evening. Tiny leaves showed on the trees
and the lawn was a smooth velvet green.

Slade's words of the long ago recurred to her.

"A soft front lawn to range in," she quoted aloud. The reason for her
restlessness came with the words.

Deane planned with her of evenings but the planning was all of play.
No word of work crept into it. If only he would accept her as wholly
into that part of his life as he did into the rest. She suddenly felt
that he was excluding her from something it was her right to share.
Their planning together was not constructive but something which led
nowhere, a restless, hectic rush for amusements which she enjoyed but
which could not make up the whole of her life. Always she had said
that men went to extremes and made of their wives either drudges or
little tinsel queens. They never followed the middle course and made
them full partners through thick and thin.

And suddenly she longed to sit for just one evening before the fire and
plan real work with Cal Harris. He had been the one man she had known
who had asked that she work with him, instead of insisting that she
work for him,--or that he should work for her. She had drifted along,
expecting that that same state of affairs would go on indefinitely,
believing that he filled the void left by old Cal Warren. But now she
knew he held that place he had created for himself. They had worked
together and she had deserted the sinking ship to play the part of the
tinsel queen.

The men would be just in from the horse round-up and breaking out the
remuda, preparatory to starting after the calves. She pictured Waddles
bawling the summons to feed from the cook-house door. She was
conscious of a flare--half of resentment, half of apprehension--toward
Harris for not having sent a word of affairs at the ranch.

"There's millions of miles of sage just outside," she quoted. "And
millions of cows--and girls." Perhaps he had gone in search of them.
Perhaps, after all, he had found that the road to the outside was not
really closed as he