d then they talked of other things till
he rose to ride away.

He headed his horse homeward, fully resolved to give notice of removal,
but he did not. On the contrary, he lost himself to Fan. The girl,
glowing with love and anger and at the very climax of her animal beauty,
developed that night a subtlety of approach, a method of attack, which
baffled and in the end overpowered him. She was adroit enough to make no
mention of her rivals; she merely set herself to cause his committal, to
bend him to her side. As the romping girl she played round him,
indifferent to the warning glances of her mother, her eyes shining, her
cheeks glowing, till the man he was, the life he had lived, the wishes
of his brother, were fused and lost in the blind passion of the present.
"This glorious, glowing creature can be mine. What does all the rest
matter?" was his final word of renunciation.

In this mood he took her to his arms, in this madness he told her of his
love (committing himself into her hands, declining into her life), and
in the end requested of her parents the honor of their daughter's hand.

Mrs. Blondell wept a tear or two and weakly gave her consent, but the
old ranchman thundered and lightened. "What can you do for my girl?" he
demanded. "As I understand it, you haven't a cent--the very clothes
you've got on your back are paid for by somebody else! What right have
you to come to me with such a proposal?"

To all this Lester, surprised and disconcerted, could but meekly answer
that he hoped soon to buy a ranch of his own--that his brother had
promised to "set him up" as soon as he had mastered the business.

Blondell opened his jaws to roar again when Fan interposed and, taking a
clutch in his shaggy beard, said, calmly: "Now, dad, you hush! George
Adelbert and I have made it all up and you better fall in gracefully. It
won't do you any good to paw the dirt and beller."

Lester grew sick for a moment as he realized the temper of the family
into which he was about to marry, but when Fan, turning with a gay
laugh, put her round, smooth arm about his neck, the rosy cloud closed
over his head again.

II

Blondell was silenced, but not convinced. A penniless son-in-law was not
to his liking. Fan was his only child, and the big ranch over which he
presided was worth sixty thousand dollars. What right had this lazy
Englishman to come in and marry its heiress? The more he thought about
it the angrier he grew, and when h