d not trace. There were times when she
could not have told whether the character she admired belonged to the
real or the unreal.

She was thinking much of this to-day while she rode into the subdued
light of the cottonwood. Was she, absorbed in the task of putting a
real character in her story, to confess that her interest in him was
not wholly the interest of the artist who sees the beauties and virtues
of a model only long enough to paint them into the picture? The
blushes came when she suddenly realized that her interest was not
wholly professional, that she had lately lingered long over her model,
at times when she had not been thinking of the story at all.

Then, too, she had considered her friends in the East. What would they
say if they knew of her friendship with the Two Diamond stray-man? The
standards of Eastern civilization were not elastic enough to include
the man whom she had come to know so well, who had strode as boldly
into her life as he had strode into her story, with his steady, serene
eyes, his picturesque rigging, and his two guns, their holsters tied so
suggestively and forebodingly down. Would her friends be able to see
the romance in him? Would they be able to estimate him according to
the standards of the world in which he lived, in which he moved so
gracefully?

She was aware that, measured by Eastern standards, Ferguson fell far
short of the average in those things that combine to produce the
polished gentleman. Yet she was also aware that these things were mere
accomplishments, a veneer acquired through constant practice--and that
usually the person known as "gentleman" could not be distinguished by
these things at all--that the real "gentleman" could be known only
through the measure of his quiet and genuine consideration and
unfailing Christian virtues.

As she rode through the cottonwood, into that deep solitude which
brings with it a mighty reverence for nature and a solemn desire for
communion with the soul--that solitude in which all affectation
disappears and man is face to face with his Maker--she tried to think
of Ferguson in an Eastern drawing room, attempting a sham courtesy,
affecting mannerisms that more than once had brought her own soul into
rebellion. But she could not get him into the imaginary picture. He
did not belong there; it seemed that she was trying to force a living
figure into a company of mechanical puppets. And so they were--puppets
who answered t