d her face away, and he knew the yearning was in her eyes as
they strained into the starlit horizon after the things she had never
known.

"I don't see what could ever happen that would make me want to stay
here," she said at last. She got up with the sudden nimbleness of a
deer, so quickly that Mackenzie though she must be either startled or
offended, but saw in a moment it was only her natural way of moving in
the untrammeled freedom of her lithe, strong limbs.

"You'll find a soft place on the side of the hill somewhere to sleep,"
she said, turning toward the wagon. "I'm going to pile in. Good
night."

Mackenzie sat again by the ashes of the little fire after giving her
good night. He felt that he had suffered in her estimation because of
his lowly ambition to follow her father, and the hundred other obscure
heroes of the sheep country, and become a flockmaster, sequestered and
safe among the sage-gray hills.

Joan expected more of a man who was able to teach school; expected
lofty aims, far-reaching ambitions. But that was because Joan did not
know the world that lifted the lure of its flare beyond the rim of her
horizon. She must taste it to understand, and come back with a bruised
heart to the shelter of her native hills.

And this lonesomeness of which she had been telling him, this dread
sickness that fell upon a man in those solitudes, and drained away his
courage and hope--must he experience it, like a disease of adolescence
from which few escape? He did not believe it. Joan had said she was
immune to it, having been born in its atmosphere, knowing nothing but
solitude and silence, in which there was no strange nor fearful
thing.

But she fretted under a discontent that made her miserable, even
though it did not strain her reason like the lonesomeness. Something
was wanting to fill her life. He cast about him, wondering what it
could be, wishing that he might supply it and take away the shadow out
of her eyes.

It was his last thought as he fell asleep in a little swale below the
wagon where the grass was tall and soft--that he might find what was
lacking to make Joan content with the peace and plenty of the
sheeplands, and supply that want.

CHAPTER VII

THE EASIEST LESSON

"Why do they always begin the conjugations on _love_?"

There was no perplexity in Joan's eyes as she asked the question;
rather, a dreamy and far-away look, the open book face-downward on the
ground beside her.