ce. From horizon to
horizon the sky was one cloudless span of blue that paled as it dipped
earthward. Mary Carmichael dozed and wakened, but the prospect was always
the same--the red stage crawling over the wilderness, making no evident
progress, and always the sun, the sage-brush, and the silence.

It was all so overwhelmingly different from the peaceful atmosphere of
things at home. The mellow Virginia country, with its winding, red roads,
wealth of woodland, and its grave old houses that were the more haughtily
aloof for the poverty that gnawed at their vitals. This wilderness was so
gaunt, so parched; she closed her eyes and thought of a bit of landscape
at home. A young forest of silver beeches growing straight and fine as the
threads on a loom; and through the gray perspective of their satin-smooth
trunks you caught the white gleam of a fairy cascade as it tumbled over
the moss-grown stones to the brook below. It was like a bit from a
Japanese garden in its delicate artificiality.

And harder to leave than these cherished bits of landscape had been the
old house Runnymede, that always seemed dozing in the peaceful comatose of
senility. It was beyond the worry of debt; the succession of mortgages
that sapped its vitality and wrote anxious lines on the faces of Aunt
Adelaide and Aunt Martha was nothing to the old house. Had it not
sheltered Carmichaels for over a century?--it had faith in the name. But
Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage had
not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing the sangaree of
its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer afternoons, invading the
very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the old mahogany table, prompting
Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at the worn silver--would it go to
pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?

But hardest of all to leave had been Archie, best and most promising of
young brothers--Archie, who had come out ahead of his class in the
high-school, all ready to go to The University--the University of Virginia
is always "The University"; but who, it had seemed at a certain dark
season, must give up this long-cherished hope for lack of the wherewithal.
Mary, being four years older than her brother and quite twenty, had long
felt a maternal obligation to administer his affairs. If he did not go to
the university, like his father and grandfather before him, it would be
because she had failed in her duty. At this parti