dly intimation of guardianship unrelaxed and untiring, I
remembered that I had one faithful and unexacting friend, even though
it was nothing better than a dog.

_Sunday the Twelfth_

Dinky-Dunk rather surprised me to-day by asking why I was so
stand-offish with his Cousin Allie. I told him that I wasn't in the
habit of curling up like a kitten on a slab of Polar ice.

"But she really likes you, Tabbie," my husband protested. "She wants
to know you and understand you. Only you keep intimidating her, and
placing her at a disadvantage."

This was news to me. Lady Alicia, I'd imagined, stood in awe of
nothing on the earth beneath nor the heavens above. She can speak very
sharply, I've already noticed, to Struthers, when the occasion arises.
And she's been very calm and deliberate, as I've already observed, in
her manner of taking over Casa Grande. For she _has_ formally taken it
over, Dinky-Dunk tells me, and in a day or two we all have to trek to
town for the signing of the papers. She is, apparently, going to run
the ranch on her own hook, and in her own way. It will be well worth
watching.

I was rather anxious to hear the particulars of the transfer to Lady
Allie, but Dinky-Dunk seemed a little reluctant to go into details,
and I didn't intend to make a parade of my curiosity. I can bide my
time.... Yesterday I put on my old riding-suit, saddled Paddy, fed the
Twins to their last mouthful, and went galloping off through the mud
to help bring the cattle over to the Harris Ranch. I was a sight, in
that weather-stained old suit and ragged toppers, even before I got
freckled and splashed with prairie-mud. I was standing up in the
stirrups laughing at Francois, who'd had a bad slip and fallen in a
puddle just back of our old corral, when her Ladyship came out. She
must have taken me for a drunken cowboy who'd rolled into a sheep-dip,
for my nose was red and my old Stetson sombrero was crooked on the
back of my head and even my hair was caked with mud. She called to me,
rather imperiously, so I went stampeding up to her, and let Paddy
indulge in that theatrical stop-slide of his, on his haunches, so that
it wasn't until his nose was within two feet of her own that she could
be quite sure she wasn't about to be run down.

Her eyes popped a little when she saw it was a woman on Paddy, though
she'd refused to show a trace of fear when we went avalanching down on
her. Then she studied my g