var, and, last, a lady in white muslin pouring tea. The stern reality
apparently consisted in scorching alkali plains, with houses of the
packing-box school of architecture at a distance of seventy or eighty
miles apart. No ladies in white muslin poured tea; they garbed themselves
in simple gunny-sacking, and their repartee had an acrid, personal note.
But Mary was glad to know that Archie had that picture, and that he
thought of her in such ideal surroundings.

X

On Horse-thief Trail

Judith, on her black mare, Dolly, left the Dax ranch after the mid-day
meal to go in quest of her brother. He had left his comfortable cabin on
the Bear Creek, when he had turned rustler, and moved into the "bad man's
country," one of those remote mountain fastnesses that abound in Wyoming
and furnish a natural protection to the fugitive from justice. Judith took
the left fork of the road even as Peter Hamilton had chosen the right, the
day she had watched him gallop towards Kitty Colebrooke with never a
glance backward. Judith strove now to put him and the memory of that day
from her mind by turning towards the open country without a glance in the
direction he had taken. But her thoughts were weary of journeying over
that trail that she would not look towards; in imagination she had
travelled it with Peter a hundred times, saw each dip and turn of the
yellow road, each feature of the landscape as he rode exultant to Kitty,
to be turned, tried, taken or left as her mood should prompt. But Judith
was more woman than saint, and in her heart there was a blending of joy
and pain. For she knew--such skill has love in inference from detail--that
the mysterious far-away girl, who was so powerful that she could have
whatever she wanted, even to Peter, loved her own ambitions better than
she did Peter or Peter's happiness, and that she would not marry him
except as a makeshift. For Miss Colebrooke wrote verses; Peter had a
white-and-gold volume of them that Judith fancied he said his prayers to.

As for Peter himself, he had never been able to explain the magic Kitty
had brewed for him. There was a heady quality in the very ring of her
name. His first glimpse of her, on Class Day, in a white gown and a hat
that to his manly indiscrimination looked as guileless as a sheaf of
poppies nodding above the pale-yellow hair that had the sheen of
corn-silk, had been a vision that stirred in him heroic promptings. H