nderstood better than the others.
When he met Theodosia he looked at her with a curious twinkle in his
keen old eyes.

"Looks as if a man could bend her any way he'd a mind to, doesn't
she?" he said. "Looks is deceiving. It'll come out in her face by and
by--she's too young yet, but it's there. It does seem unnatteral to
see a woman so stubborn--you'd kinder look for it more in a man."

Wesley wrote a brief letter to Theodosia when he reached his
destination. He said he was well and was looking about for the best
place to settle. He liked the country fine. He was at a place called
Red Butte and guessed he'd locate there.

Two weeks later he wrote again. He had taken up a claim of three
hundred acres. Greene and Cary had done the same. They were his
nearest neighbours and were three miles away. He had knocked up a
little shack, was learning to cook his own meals, and was very busy.
He thought the country was a grand one and the prospects good.

Theodosia answered his letter and told him all the Heatherton news.
She signed herself "Theodosia Brooke," but otherwise there was
nothing in the letter to indicate that it was written by a wife to
her husband.

At the end of a year Wesley wrote and once more asked her to go out to
him. He was getting on well, and was sure she would like the place. It
was a little rough, to be sure, but time would improve that.

"Won't you let bygones be bygones, Dosia?" he wrote, "and come out to
me. Do, my dear wife."

Theodosia wrote back, refusing to go. She never got any reply, nor did
she write again.

People had given up talking about the matter and asking Theodosia when
she was going out to Wes. Heatherton had grown used to the chronic
scandal within its decorous borders. Theodosia never spoke of her
husband to anyone, and it was known that they did not correspond. She
took her youngest sister to live with her. She had her garden and hens
and a cow. The farm brought her enough to live on, and she was always
busy.

* * * * *

When fifteen years had gone by there were naturally some changes in
Heatherton, sleepy and; unprogressive as it was. Most of the old
people were in the little hillside burying-ground that fronted the
sunrise. Old Jim Parmelee was there with his recollections of four
generations. Men and women who had been in their prime when Wesley
went away were old now and the children were grown up and married.

Theodosia was thirty-five