eautiful to him, though
Mary's home was sweeter, daintier, and homelier. He was in the midst of
an analysis of these subtleties when Mrs. Raimon (as he now determined
to call her) returned from changing her dress.

He was amazed at the change in her. She wore a dark gray gown with
almost no ornament, and looked smaller, older, and paler, but
incomparably more winning and womanly than she had ever seemed before.
She appeared to be serious and her voice was gentle and winning.

"Well, boy, here you are--under my roof. Not such an awful den after
all, is it?" she said with a smile.

"Beats a holler log in a snowstorm," he replied, looking about the room.
"Must have shipped all this truck from the States, it never was built
out here--it would take me a couple of months to earn a whole outfit
like this, wouldn't it?"

She remained serious. "Mose, I want to tell you----"

"Wait a minute," he interrupted; "let's start fair. My name is Harold
Excell, and I'm going to call you Mrs. Raimon."

She thrust out her hand. "Good boy!" He could see she was profoundly
pleased. Indeed she could not at once resume. At last she said: "I was
going to say, Harold, that you can't earn a home trailin' around over
these mountains year after year with a band of Indians."

He became thoughtful. "I reckon you're right about that. I'm wasting
time; I've got to picket old Kintuck somewhere and go to work if I----"

He stopped abruptly and she smiled mournfully. "You needn't hesitate;
tell me all about it."

He sat in silence--a silence that at last became a rebuke. She arose.
"Well, suppose we go out to supper; we can talk all the better there."

He felt out of place and self-conscious, but he gave little outward sign
of it as he took his seat at the table opposite her. For reasons of her
own she emphasized the domestic side of her life and fairly awed the
stern youth by her womanly dignity and grace. The little table was set
for two, with pretty dishes. Liquor had no place on the cover, but a
shining tea-pot, brought in by a smiling negress, was placed at her
right hand. Her talk for a time was of the tea, the food, his taste as
to sugar and other things pertaining to her duties as hostess. All his
lurid imaginings of her faded into the wind, and a thousand new and old
conceptions of wife and home and peaceful middle age came thronging like
sober-colored birds. If she were playing a game it was well done and
successful. Mose fell often in