.

A shadow crossed his face.

"And you don't care for anything that doesn't get you something?"

"Absolutely not."

"That doesn't sound like you," he said after a silence.

"I'm not 'me' any longer," she responded. "I made myself over to suit my
environment. I get along better."

"What has changed you so much, Kate--what in particular?"

She hesitated a moment, then answered coldly:

"Nothing in particular--everything."

"You mean you don't want to tell me?"

"What's the use?" indifferently.

"I might help you."

"How?"

"In ways that friends can help each other."

"I've tried that," she answered dryly.

"You've grown so self-sufficient that you make me feel superfluous and
helpless."

"A clinging vine that has nothing to cling to sprawls on the ground,
doesn't it?"

Since he did not answer immediately, she reminded him:

"Better loosen your horse's cinch; he'll feed better."

He glanced at her oddly as he obeyed her. How practical she was! What
she said was the right and sensible thing, of course, but was she, as
she seemed, quite without sentiment?

He returned to his place beside her and they sat without speaking,
watching the colors change on a bank of sudslike clouds and the shadows
deepen in the gulches. It never occurred to the new Kate to make
conversation, so she was unembarrassed by the silence. Save for an
occasional whimsical soliloquy, she seldom spoke without a definite
purpose nowadays. To Disston, who remembered her faculty for finding
something interesting or amusing in everything about which to chatter,
the difference was noticeable.

It saddened him, the change in her, yet he was conscious that she still
retained her strong attraction for him. With nerves relaxed, content, he
had an absurd notion that he could sit beside her on that rock
indefinitely, without speaking, and be happy.

Kate did not ask him the purpose of his visit, for her etiquette was the
etiquette of the ranges, which does not countenance questions, and
Disston, absorbed in the beauty of the sunset and his own thoughts, was
in no mood to introduce the unpleasant subject of the dynamiting of the
sheep wagon.

The pink deepened on gypsum cliffs and sandstone buttes of the distant
Bad Lands, while purple shadows crept over the green foothills and
blackened the canyons.

"Isn't it wonderful?" he said, finally, in a half whisper.

"Yes," she replied, huskily, wondering if Heaven itself had anything
like