u to do. From to-day you are in my employ."

She rode back to the ranch in the late afternoon, while the sun was
setting in a great splash of crimson. The round-up boss had hinted that
if she were nervous about riding alone he could find it convenient to
accompany her. But the girl wanted to be alone with her own thoughts,
and she had slipped away while he was busy cutting out calves from
the herd. It had been a wonderful relief to her to find that HER Ned
Bannister was the one that had survived in the conflict, and her heart
sang a paean of joy as she rode into the golden glow of the westering
sun. He was alive--to love and be loved. The unlived years of her future
seemed to unroll before her as a vision. She glowed with a resurgent
happiness that was almost an ecstasy. The words of a bit of verse she
had once seen--a mere scrap from a magazine that had stuck in an obscure
corner of her memory--sang again and again in her heart:

Life and love And a bright sky o'er us, And--God take care Of the way
before us!

Ah, the way before them, before her and her romance-radiating hero!
It might be rough and hilly, but if they trod it together--Her tangled
thoughts were off again in another glad leap of imagination.

The days passed somehow. She busied herself with the affairs of the
ranch, rode out often to the scenes of the cattle drives and watched the
round-up, and every twenty-four hours brought her one day nearer to
his return, she told herself. Nora, too, was on the lookout under her
longlashed, roguish eyelids; and the two young women discussed the
subject of their lovers' return in that elusive, elliptical way common
to their sex.

No doubt each of these young women had conjectured as to the manner of
that homecoming and the meeting that would accompany it; but it is safe
to say that neither of them guessed in her day-dreams how it actually
was to occur.

Nora had been eager to see something of the round-up, and as she was no
horsewoman her mistress took her out one day in her motor. The drive
had been that day on Bronco Mesa, and had finished in the natural corral
made by Bear Canon, fenced with a cordon of riders at the end opening
to the plains below. After watching for two hours the busy scenes of
cutting out, roping and branding, Helen wheeled her car and started down
the canyon on their return.

Now, a herd of wild cattle is uncertain as an April day's behavior.
Under the influence of the tame valley cattl