presented barriers alongside of which his previous
quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke's seniority shrank to insignificance.
He might marry a woman older than himself and swallow the grimace of it,
but by no conceivable system of argument could he persuade himself to
marry into a family like that of the Rodneys--the girl herself, for all her
beauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for
obloquy, her brother a cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men
should make the heroic marriages of a new country. He was prepared to
applaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thing
was inconceivable. Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web
of caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the
shrivelled flies dangling in the web conveying no significance,
apparently, beyond that of advertising the system.

When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit of
epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings and
arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least,
resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated at
the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded
pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines
flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, if
possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the
pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that
alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had
accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin
youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive
than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.

The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their
ages. Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she
retained a surplus it would be rude to estimate. Her greeting of him was
radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to inspiration.
A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling and the curled
and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to rouse those
lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits. But Peter only turned
the other cheek. More than once, in the days that followed, he devoutly
thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with Judith had been
governed by char