ed myself a thousand
questions and ended by deciding that I would marry him.

"It was a short courtship--delay was a word not found in Ralph Buckner's
vocabulary. We were married and began our life at his ranch, which, as I
say, was near enough to my father so that we could be in frequent
communication. He had been much concerned about me, having discovered
more of my homesickness for the East than I had realized, so to see me
well settled and apparently happy relieved him of a heavy load."

"But you weren't happy even at first," Alice insisted. "How could you
be?"

"I say 'apparently happy,' dear, for that was all it was. Ralph did what
he could for me in his own way, so at first it was perhaps my fault
that we were not more congenial; but his ways were not my ways, and I
kept looking for what was not there. He was well-born, but his life on
the ranch for so many years had dulled his appreciation of those finer,
innate qualities which every wife craves--he had forgotten how to be the
gentleman. Don't think that I expected the impossible, or anything
incongruous to the life we were leading; but there are little
attentions, thoughtful considerations and other things in a husband's
relation to his wife, trivial perhaps in themselves, which the wife
expects and misses if she does not receive--the more so, if she has
deluded herself into believing that the instincts for them are inborn,
and only require her suggestion to develop and bring them to fruition.
These qualities he had seemed to show before we were married, but they
proved to be only a veneer which soon wore off."

"Why do you bring this all back now ?" Alice asked, sympathetically,
seeing the lines deepen in Eleanor's face.

"I must tell it to you, dear--we have grown so close that I feel this is
all that remains between us. When you know this, we shall be sisters
indeed."

"We are that already and more," Alice urged. "Only think how near of an
age we really are."

"In years, yes; but sometimes I feel as if I had already lived
centuries."

"Will the telling of this take a few of those centuries from you?" the
girl inquired, smiling.

"I hope so; and that is one reason why I am asking you to share the
burden with me. All that I have told you so far has been unimportant
compared with what followed. Had it simply been a difference in
temperament, I have no doubt that I should have become accustomed to
the absence of these things I craved, and have adjust