eemed to
have no end.

Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something
more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which
nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past
which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded
into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when
she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting
older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to
become more exacting.

"Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were
twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian
charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I
wonder--now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage
costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and
subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing
blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the
wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of God!" he said.

Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.

"Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs.
"It's P.D."

"P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good
morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to
alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!"

"He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q."

"Pretty Damn, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!"

Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house
when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and
veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was
its most pronounced characteristic.

Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an
overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over
logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it
was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and
her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment
that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never
expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly
to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What
sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been
anything