hen he looked at her.

He followed her inside and formally took a chair, sitting on its edge and
turning his hat over and over in his hands, looking much at it, as if it
were new and he admired it greatly.

But this constraint between them was not the only thing that was new to
him. While she talked, he sat and listened, and stole covert glances at
her, and tried to convince himself that it was really Hagar that was
sitting there before him.

But before long he grew accustomed to the strangeness of the situation,
and constraint dropped from him. "Why, I reckon it's all natural," he
confided to her. "Folks grow up, don't they? Take you. Yesterday you was
a kid, an' I dawdled you on my knee. Today you're a woman, an' it makes
me feel some breathless to look at you. But it's all natural. I'd been
seein' you so much that I'd forgot that time was makin' a woman of you."

She blushed, and he marveled over it. "She can't see, herself, how she's
changed," he told himself. And while they talked he studied her, noting
that her color was higher than he had ever seen it, that the frank
expression of her eyes had somehow changed--there was a glow in them,
deep, abiding, embarrassed. They drooped from his when he tried to hold
her gaze. He had always admired the frank directness of them--that told
of unconsciousness of sex, of unquestioning trust. Today, it seemed to
him, there was subtle knowledge in them. He was puzzled and disappointed.
And when, half an hour later, he took his leave, after telling her that
he would come again, to see her "dad," he took her by the shoulders and
forced her to look into his eyes. His own searched hers narrowly. It was
as in the old days--in his eyes she was still a child.

"I reckon I won't kiss you no more, Hagar," he said. "You ain't a kid no
more, an' it wouldn't be square. Seventeen is an awful old age, ain't
it?"

And then he mounted and rode down the trail, still puzzled over the
lurking, deep glow in her eyes.

"I reckon I ain't no expert on women's eyes," he said as he rode. "But
Hagar's--there's somethin' gone out of them."

He could not have reached the break in the canyon leading to the plains
above the river, when Willard Masten loped his horse toward the Catherson
cabin from an opposite direction.

Hagar was standing on the porch when he came, and her face flooded with
color when she saw him. She stood, her eyes drooping with shy
embarrassment as Masten dismounted and approach