father.

But the girl's eyes were bent upon the ground. She did not see the
equipage or the man on the purple cushions.

"You do little things?" she said, raising her eyes gravely to the
doctor's. He had always seemed to her the man who did great things. "I
will try," she added, seriously.

While she talked with the doctor the world seemed to Lola a pleasant
place, with a golden light on its long levels and a purple glamour on
its hills. And after he had left her, she went with a light heart down
the unpaved street that she had lately traversed in unseeing
bitterness. The very hum of the mine cars was full of good cheer;
children splashed joyously in the ditch; magpies gossiped; the
blacksmith-shop rang with a merry din of steel.

Set emerald-like in the yellow circle of the prairies, the green young
cottonwood grove about Jane's house shone fresh and vivid. At the white
gate a carriage waited--a strange carriage which Lola scrutinized
wonderingly as she approached. With delighted eyes she noted the
purple cushions and the satin coats of the horses. Who could have
come? Whose voice was that which issued from the house in an unbroken
monologue, genial, laughing, breathless?

Suddenly, as she mounted the porch steps, a persuasion of familiarity
in those light accents overcame her. Could it be that her father had
come at last? That, after all her waiting, she was to see him and talk
with him and sob out on his breast her appreciation of his long labors
in her behalf, his kindness, unselfishness and goodness?

She forgot that she had sometimes been hurt at his silence and absence.
Her childhood swam before her; she recalled the sweetness of her
mother's face, and in that memory he who awaited her in Jane's
sitting-room gathered a graciousness which exalted him, as if he, too,
had been dead and was alive again.

The talk broke off at her impetuous entrance. Upon a chair sat a man
with a round and ruddy face, with bright blue eyes and a curling spread
of yellow beard. Lola hesitated. She doubted if this richly arrayed,
somewhat stout man could be the slim, boyish-looking father she
remembered. Then the unalterable joyousness of his glance reassured
her, and she rushed forward crying, "Oh, it's you! It's you!"

She had not noticed Jane, who sat opposite, mute and relaxed, like one
in whom hope and resolution flag and fail; but Jane's deep eyes
followed Lola's swift motion, and her look changed a little at the
girl's