undings. Scrupulously fresh-shaven each day,
fortified beyond the compound lenses of his spectacles, a stranger would
have guessed him anywhere from thirty-five to fifty.

Time had not dealt as kindly with Mrs. Baker. She seemed to have aged
enough for both herself and her husband. Notwithstanding the fact that
for the first eight years of the twelve, the family had spent half their
time in the East, she had grown careless of her appearance. True to his
instincts, Scotty still dressed for dinner in his antiquated evening
clothes; but pathetic as was the example, it had long ceased to
stimulate her. The last four years had been dead years with Mollie
Baker. The future held but one promise. She referred to it daily, almost
hourly; and at such times only would a trace of youth and beauty return
to the one-time winsome face. She looked forward and dreamed of an
event after which she would do certain things upon which she had set her
heart; when, as she said, she would begin to live. It seemed to Scotty
ghastly to speak about that event, for it was the death of his father.

The last member of the family had developed with the child's promise,
and at seventeen Florence was beautiful; not with a conventional
prettiness, but with a vital feminine attraction. All that the mother
had been, with her dark, oval face, her mass of walnut-brown hair, her
great dark eyes, her uptilted chin, the daughter was now; but with added
health and an augmented femininity that the mother had never known.
Moreover, she had an independence, a dominance, born perhaps of the wild
prairie influence, that at times made her parents almost gasp. Except in
the minute details of their daily existence, which habit had made
unchangeable, she ruled them absolutely. Even Rankin had become a
secondary factor. Scotty probably would have denied the assertion
emphatically, yet at the bottom of his consciousness he realized that
had she told him to sell everything he possessed for what he could get
and return to old Sussex he would have complied. Considering Mollie's
daily plaint, it was a constant source of wonder to him that the girl
did not do this; but she seemed wholly satisfied with things as they
were. For exercise and excitement she rode almost every horse upon the
place--rode astride like a man. For amusement she read everything she
could lay hands upon, both from the modest Baker library and from the
larger and more creditable collection which Rankin had