y his
own efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle
and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp of
his own hand. Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more to
heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives. Peter made
no confidences. He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit; he was
a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother's side of the
family.

In those days Peter wore his rue--whether for lady fair or for towering
prospects stricken down--with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a
gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence. His
instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little
with his new associates had he been a whit less manly. But as he shirked
no part of the universal hardship, they left him his reticence. He even
came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with
the best--a nonchalant social connoisseur--yet who realized the stern
primitive beauties of the range life.

Judith's convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage of
a gentlewoman's tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an alien in
her father's house. When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for her
education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw moreover
that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but
Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what
it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family,
uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.

In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to
the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself. From the
beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance.
Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness
had become a proverb. He came of a family that numbered a signer of the
Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice, and the dean of a
great university; Judith was uncertain of her right to the very name she
bore. And yet they were young, he a man, she a woman--eternal fountain of
interest. A precocious sense of the fitness of things was the compass that
enabled Peter to steer through the deep waters in the years that followed.
But the girl paid the penalty of her great heart; in that troublous sea of
friendship, she was soon adrift without rudder,