emed to belong to books and gardens.

"I wish I had time to look over the Town Wonderful in the morning, but my
train goes very early, I believe."

After his years of aimless travelling, to which he had so readily
confessed, he had tied himself to a definite hour on a railroad
schedule as something commanding and inviolable. Such inconsistency
did not surprise her. Had she not already learned to expect
inconsistencies from him?

"Oh, it is all simple and primitive, but it means a lot to us," she said.

"What one's home and people mean to him is pretty well all of one's own
human drama," he returned, seriously.

The peace of evening was in the air and the lights along the single
street were a gentle and persistent protest of human life against the
mighty stretch of the enveloping mantle of night. From the cottages of
the ranchers came the sound of voices. The twang of a guitar quivering
starward made medley with Jag Ear's bells.

Here, for a little distance, the trail, in its long reach on the desert,
had taken on the dignity of the urban name of street. On either side,
fronting the cottages, ran the slow waters of two irrigation ditches,
gleaming where lamp-rays penetrated the darkness. The date of each
rancher's settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the
quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade.
Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the
centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling
bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its
architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad
veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary
drew rein.

"This is home," she said; "and--and thank you!"

He could not see her face, which was in the shadow turned toward him, as
he looked into the light of the lantern from the other side of her pony.

"And--thank you!"

It was as if she had been on the point of saying something else and
could not get the form of any sentence except these two words. Was there
anything further to say except "Thank you"? Anything but to repeat
"Thank you"?

There he stood, this stranger so correctly introduced by the Eternal
Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward
diffidence. He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail
in a quizzical appeal. Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of