of the boys sort
of stand in awe of you, wouldn't dare talk marrying to you even in the
height of delirium tremens. The only men who have ever had courage to
make any display in that direction are Inspector Fyles, when his duty
brings him in the neighborhood of Rocky Springs, and a dypsomaniac
rancher and artist, to wit, Charlie Bryant. And how do you take it?
You--a man-hunter? Why, you run like a rabbit from Fyles. Courage?
Oh, dear. The mention of his name is enough to send you into
convulsions of trepidation and maidenly confusion. And all the time
you secretly admire him. As for the other, you have turned yourself
into a sort of hospital nurse and temperance reformer. You've taken
him up as a sort of hobby, until, in his lucid intervals, he takes
advantage of your reforming process to acquire the added disease of
love, which has reduced him to a condition of imbecile infatuation
with your charming self."

Kate was about to break in with a laughing protest, but Helen stayed
her with a gesture of denial.

"Wait," she cried, grandly. "Hear the whole charge. Look at your
village life, which you plead guilty to. You, a high-spirited woman of
independence and daring. You are no better than a sort of hired
cleaner to a Meeting House you have adopted, and which is otherwise
run by a lot of cut-throats and pirates, whose wives and offspring are
no better than themselves. You attend the village social functions
with as much appreciation of them as any village mother with an
unwashed but growing family. You gossip with them and scandalize as
badly as any of them, and, in your friendliness and charity toward
them, I verily believe, for two cents, you'd go among the said
unwashed offspring with a scrub-brush. What--what is coming to you,
Kate? You--a man-hunter? No--no," she went on, with a hopeless shake
of her pretty head, "'tis no use talking. The big, big spirit of early
womanhood has somehow failed you. It's failed us both. We are no
longer man-hunters. The soaring Kate, bearing her less brave sister in
her arms, has fallen. They have both tumbled to the ground. The early
seed, so full of promise, has germinated and grown--but it's come up
cabbages. And--and they're getting old. There you are, I can't help
it. I've tripped over the agricultural furrow we've ploughed, and----.
There!"

She flung out an arm dramatically, pointing down at the slight figure
of a man coming toward them, slowly toiling up the slope of the
v