giving him an added
moment or two.

"No, I don't care much for dancing; and you know very well why I
couldn't, or wouldn't, be anybody's good company to-night," he said.
Then: "It was cruel of you to deny me this last evening by not letting
me know that you were here."

"'This last evening'?" she echoed. "Why 'last'?"

"Because I am leaving Boston and New England to-morrow--or rather,
Monday. It is the only thing to do."

"I am sorry you are taking it this way, Evan," she deprecated, in the
sisterly tone that always made him hotly resentful. "It hurts my sense
of proportion."

"Sometimes I think you haven't any sense of proportion, Patricia," he
retorted half-morosely. "If you have, I am sure it is frightfully
distorted."

The recalcitrant motor had given a few preliminary explosions, and a
white-haired old gentleman in the tonneau was calling impatiently to
Patricia to come and take her place so that he might close the door.

"It is you who have the distorted perspective, Evan," she countered.
"But I refused to quarrel with you last night, and I am refusing to
quarrel with you now. It pleases you to believe that a woman's place in
this twentieth-century world is inevitably at the fireside--her own
fireside. I don't agree with you; I am afraid I shall never agree with
you. Where are you going?"

"I am going West, Monday."

"How odd!" she commented. "We are going West, too--father and I--though
not quite so soon as Monday."

"You are?" he queried. "Whereabout in the West?"

She did not tell him where. The car motor was whirring smoothly now,
the chauffeur was sliding into his seat behind the pilot-wheel, and the
old gentleman in the tonneau was growing quite violently impatient.

"If we are both going in the same direction we needn't say good-by," she
said hastily, giving him her hand at parting. "Let it be _auf
wiedersehen_." Then the clang of the closing tonneau door and the
outgoing rush of the big car coincided so accurately that Blount had to
spring nimbly aside to save himself from being run down.

II

THE BOSS

It is a far cry from Boston to the land of broken mountain ranges, lone
buttes, and irrigated mesas, and a still farther one from the veranda of
an exclusive North Shore club to a private dining-room in the
Inter-Mountain Hotel, whose entrance portico faces the Capitol grounds
in the chief city of the Sage-brush State, whose eastern windows command
a magnificent view of the Lost