is leg with such consequences. It wasn't the correct thing--very
commonplace, I should say--and think of Irene! Why, the child--she's
but a child, Andrew, a very beautiful child, but with just a little
weakness for the--ah--unconventional--she must be restrained--she needs
her mother's guidance to protect her from the suggestion of
maybe--shall I say?--vulgarity. That's a very dreadful word. Think of
all the vulgar people there are in the world. . . . And here is dear
little Irene right in the midst of it, and--horrors--revelling in it."

Then she looked again from the open window, this time with eyes that
saw the vista of valley and woodland and foothill that stretched down
into the opening prairie. Suddenly she realized that she was looking
down upon a picture--one of Nature's obscure masterpieces--painted in
brown and green and saffron against an opal canvas. It was beautiful,
not with the majesty of the great mountains, nor the solemnity of the
great plains, but with that nearer, more intimate relationship which is
the peculiar property of the foothill country. Here was neither the
flatness that, with a change of mood, could become in a moment
desolation, nor the aloofness of eternal rocks towering into cold
space, but the friendship of hills that could be climbed, and trees
that lisped in the light wind, and water that babbled playfully over
gravel ridges gleaming in the August sunshine. The girl drew a great
breath of the pure air and was about to dream a new day-dream when the
voice of her father brought her to earth.

"Can't you find anything that will do for a bandage?" he asked.

"Oh you dear Daddykins," she replied, her voice tremulous with
self-reproach. "I had forgotten. There was a spell, or something; it
just came down upon me in the window. That's a good idea, blaming
one's negligence on a spell. I must remember that. But the bandage?
Dear, no; the only cloth I see is the kitchen towel, and I can't
recommend it. But what a goose I am! Our grips are in the car, or
under it, or somewhere. I'll be back in a jiffy." And she was off at
a sharp trot down the trail along which she had so recently come in
Dave Elden's wagon.

At the little stream she paused. A single log was the only bridge, and
although the water was not deep it ran swiftly, and still with the
coldness of its glacier source. She ventured along the log, but near
the centre she was seized with an acute sense of her temerity