e--there's room enough."

She was pointing to the canyon below. The veranda actually projected
over its brink, and seemed to hang in mid air above it. Mainwaring
almost mechanically threw his arm out to catch the incautious girl, who
had stepped heedlessly to its extreme edge.

"How odd! Don't you find it rather dangerous here?" he could not help
saying. "I mean--you might have had a railing that wouldn't intercept
the view and yet be safe?"

"It's a fancy of Mr. Bradley's," returned the young girl carelessly.
"It's all like this. The house was built on a ledge against the side of
the precipice, and the road suddenly drops down to it."

"It's tremendously pretty, all the same, you know," said the young man
thoughtfully, gazing, however, at the girl's rounded chin above him.

"Yes," she replied curtly. "But this isn't working. I must go back to
Jenny. You can shell the peas until Mr. Bradley comes home. He won't be
long."

She turned away, and re-entered the house. Without knowing why, he
thought her withdrawal abrupt, and he was again feeling his ready color
rise with the suspicion of either having been betrayed by the young
girl's innocent fearlessness into some unpardonable familiarity, which
she had quietly resented, or of feeling an ease and freedom in the
company of these two women that were inconsistent with respect, and
should be restrained.

He, however, began to apply himself to the task given to him with his
usual conscientiousness of duty, and presently acquired a certain manual
dexterity in the operation. It was "good fun" to throw the cast-off
husks into the mighty unfathomable void before him, and watch them
linger with suspended gravity in mid air for a moment--apparently
motionless--until they either lost themselves, a mere vanishing black
spot in the thin ether, or slid suddenly at a sharp angle into unknown
shadow. How deuced odd for him to be sitting here in this fashion! It
would be something to talk of hereafter, and yet,--he stopped--it was
not at all in the line of that characteristic adventure, uncivilized
novelty, and barbarous freedom which for the last month he had sought
and experienced. It was not at all like his meeting with the grizzly
last week while wandering in a lonely canyon; not a bit in the line of
his chance acquaintance with that notorious ruffian, Spanish Jack, or
his witnessing with his own eyes that actual lynching affair at Angels.
No! Nor was it at all characteristic,