y! And her
cheeks turned deep pink as she sat alone with her lover's letter.)

I am coming the first day I am free. I will be a hundred miles from you
most of the time when I am not more but I will ride a hundred miles for
one hour and Monte is up to that. After never seeing you for so long I
will make one hour do if I have to. Here is a flower I have just been
out and picked. I have kissed it now. That is the best I can do yet.

Molly laid the letter in her lap and looked at the flower. Then suddenly
she jumped up and pressed it to her lips, and after a long moment held
it away from her.

"No," she said. "No, no, no." She sat down.

It was some time before she finished the letter. Then once more she got
up and put on her hat.

Mrs. Taylor wondered where the girl could be walking so fast. But she
was not walking anywhere, and in half an hour she returned, rosy with
her swift exercise, but with a spirit as perturbed as when she had set
out.

Next morning at six, when she looked out of her window, there was Monte
tied to the Taylor's gate. Ah, could he have come the day before, could
she have found him when she returned from that swift walk of hers!

XXV. PROGRESS OF THE LOST DOG

It was not even an hour's visit that the Virginian was able to pay
his lady love. But neither had he come a hundred miles to see her. The
necessities of his wandering work had chanced to bring him close enough
for a glimpse of her, and this glimpse he took, almost on the wing. For
he had to rejoin a company of men at once.

"Yu' got my letter?" he said.

"Yesterday."

"Yesterday! I wrote it three weeks ago. Well, yu' got it. This cannot
be the hour with you that I mentioned. That is coming, and maybe very
soon."

She could say nothing. Relief she felt, and yet with it something like a
pang.

"To-day does not count," he told her, "except that every time I see you
counts with me. But this is not the hour that I mentioned."

What little else was said between them upon this early morning shall be
told duly. For this visit in its own good time did count momentously,
though both of them took it lightly while its fleeting minutes passed.
He returned to her two volumes that she had lent him long ago and
with Taylor he left a horse which he had brought for her to ride. As a
good-by, he put a bunch of flowers in her hand. Then he was gone, and
she watched him going by the thick bushes along the stream. They were
pink with wild r