agination be regarded as the ledge of the photograph. Disheartened,
but not discouraged, the girl would return each evening to her
solitary cabin, eat her solitary meal, and throw herself upon her bunk
to brood over the apparent hopelessness of her enterprise, or to read
from the thumbed and tattered magazines of the dispossessed sheep
herder. She rode, now, with a sort of dogged persistence. There was
none of the wild thrill that, during the first days of her search,
she experienced each time she topped a new divide, or entered a new
valley.

Three times since she had informed him she would play a lone hand in
the search for her father's strike, Bethune had called at the cabin.
And not once had he alluded to the progress of her work. She was
thankful to him for that--she had not forgotten the hurt in her
father's eyes as the taunting questions of the scoffers struck home.
Always she had known of the hurt, but now, with the disheartening days
of her own failure heaping themselves upon her, she was beginning to
understand the reason for the hurt. And, guessing this, Bethune
refrained from questioning, but talked gaily of books, and sunsets,
and of life, and love, and the joy of living. A supreme optimist, she
thought him, despite the half-veiled cynicism that threaded his
somewhat fatalistic view of life, a cynicism that but added the
necessary _sauce piquante_ to so abandoned an optimism.

Above all, the man was a gentleman. His speech held nothing of the
abrupt bluntness of Vil Holland's. He would appear shortly after her
early supper, and was always well upon his way before the late
darkness began to obscure the contours of her little valley. An hour's
chat upon the doorstep of the cabin and he was gone--riding down the
valley, singing as he rode some old _chanson_ of his French forebears,
with always a pause at the cottonwood grove for a farewell wave of his
hat. And Patty would turn from the doorway, and light her lamp, and
proceed to enjoy the small present which he never failed to leave in
her hand--a box of bon-bons of a kind she had vainly sought for in the
little town--again, a novel, a woman's novel written by a man who
thought he knew--and another time, just a handful of wild flowers
gathered in the hills. She ate the candy making it last over several
days. She read the book from cover to cover as she lay upon her air
mattress, tucked snugly between her blankets. And she arranged the
wild flowers loosely in