have confessed it, but a
strange sense of respect for the girl before her had driven her to utter
them.

Lucy greeted the remark graciously.

"That's what I think," she replied.

"Then at least we agree on somethin'," returned Ellen dryly, "an' mebbe
before I put my foot in it an' lose this bit of your good opinion, I'd
better take you up to your room."

She caught up the heavy satchel from the floor.

"Oh, don't," Lucy protested. "Please let me take it. I'm used to carrying
heavy things. I am very strong."

"Strong, are you?" questioned Ellen, without, however, turning her head or
offering to surrender the large leather holdall. "An' how, pray, did you
get so strong?" She passed into the hall and up the stairs as she spoke,
Lucy following.

"Oh, driving horses, doing housework, cooking, cleaning, and shooting,"
the girl replied. Then as if a forgotten activity had come to her mind as
an afterthought, she added gaily: "And sawing wood, I guess."

"You can do things like that?"

"Yes, indeed. I had to after Mother died and we moved to Bald Mountain
where Dad's mine was. I did all the work for my father and ten Mexicans."

"You? Why didn't your father get a woman in?"

Lucy broke into a merry laugh.

"A woman! Why, Aunt Ellen, there wasn't a woman within twenty miles. It
was only a mining camp, you see; just Dad and his men."

"An' you mean to tell me you were the sole woman in a place like that?"

Lucy's silvery laughter floated upward.

"The ten Mexicans who boarded with us were engineers and bosses," she
explained. "There were over fifty miners in the camp besides."

Stopping midway up the staircase Ellen wheeled and said indignantly:

"An' Thomas kep' you in a settlement like that?"

"Who?"

"Your father."

"Why not?"

"'Twarn't no place for a girl."

"It was the place for me."

"Why?"

"Because Dad was there."

Something in the reply left Ellen wordless and made her continue her way
upstairs without answering. When she did speak, it was to say in a gentler
tone:

"Mebbe you'll like the room I'm going to give you. It used to belong to
your Dad when he was a little boy."

She lifted the latch of a paneled door and stood looking into a large
bedroom. The sun slanted across a bare, painted floor, which was covered
by a few braided rugs, old and worn; there was a great four-poster about
which were draped chintz curtains, yellowed by age, and between the
windows stood a mahogany bureau