a Macpherson, although never
blinded to the truth about Jerry in her impetuous, self-willed,
unsympathetic, undeveloped nature, loved her too well to doubt her
ultimate triumph over all fortune. Only York, who studied her closest of
all three, because he was the keenest reader of human nature, still held
that the final outcome for Jerry Swaim was a matter of uncertainty.

"I tell you, Laura," York said, one evening in the early spring of the
third year, when Jerry had gone with Joe Thomson for a long horseback
ride up the Sage Brush--"I tell you that girl is still a type of her
own, which means that sometimes she is soft-hearted, and romantic, and
frivolous, and impulsive, and affectionate, like Lesa Swaim, and
sometimes clear-eyed, hard-headed, close-fisted, with a keen judgment
for values, practical, and clever, like old Jim."

"And which parent, Sir Oracle, would you have her be most like?" Laura
inquired.

"Lord knows," York replied. "As He alone knows how much of the good of
each she may reject and how much of the weak and objectionable she may
appropriate."

"Being a free moral agent to just dissect her fond parents and choose
and refuse at will when she makes up her life and being for herself!
It's a way we all have of doing, you know," Laura said, sarcastically.
"Remember, York, when you elected to look like papa, only you chose
mother's wavy brown hair instead of her husband's straight black locks;
and you voted you'd have her clear judgment in business matters, which
our father never had."

"And gave to you the same which he never possessed. Yes, I remember,"
York retorted. "But how is all this psychological analysis going to help
matters here?"

"How's it going to help Joe Thomson, or keep him from being helped, you
mean?" Laura suggested.

A faint flush crept into York Macpherson's brown cheek.

"It's dead sure Jerry has little enough thought of Joe now," York said,
gravely. "She's living a day at a time, and underneath the three years'
veneer of genuine service the real Philadelphia Geraldine Swaim is still
a sojourner in the Sage Brush Valley, not a fixture here."

And York was right so far as Jerry Swaim's thought of Joe Thomson was
concerned.

After signing the lease with York Macpherson she rarely spoke of her
property to any one until it came to be forgotten to the few who knew of
it at all.

Once she had said to Joe:

"That heritage of mine is like the grave of an enemy. I couldn't loo