relating all that was known or guessed, or observed
regarding the stranger. But of her meeting with Patches, Kitty said
little; only that she had met him as she was coming home. All during the
evening meal, too, Patches was the principal topic of the conversation,
though Mr. Reid, who had arrived home just in time for supper, said
little.

When supper was over, and the evening work finished, Kitty sat on the
porch in the twilight, looking away across the wide valley meadows,
toward the light that shone where the walnut trees about the
Cross-Triangle ranch house made a darker mass in the gathering gloom.
Her father had gone to call upon the Dean. The men were at the
bunk-house, from which their voices came low and indistinct. Within the
house the mother was coaxing little Jack to bed. Jimmy and Conny, at the
farther end of the porch, were planning an extensive campaign against
coyotes, and investing the unearned profits of their proposed industry.

Kitty's thoughts were many miles away. In that bright and stirring
life--so far from the gloomy stillness of her home land, where she sat
so alone--what gay pleasures held her friends? Amid what brilliant
scenes were they spending the evening, while she sat in her dark and
silent world alone? As her memory pictured the lights, the stirring
movement, the music, the merry-voiced talk, the laughter, the gaiety,
the excitement, the companionship of those whose lives were so full of
interest, her heart rebelled at the dull emptiness of her days. As she
watched the evening dusk deepen into the darkness of the night, and the
outlines of the familiar landscape fade and vanish in the thickening
gloom, she felt the dreary monotony of the days and years that were to
come, blotting out of her life all tone and color and forms of
brightness and beauty.

Then she saw, slowly emerging from the shadows of the meadow below, a
darker shadow--mysterious, formless--that seemed, as it approached, to
shape itself out of the very darkness through which it came, until,
still dim and indistinct, a horseman was opening the meadow gate. Before
the cowboy answered Jimmy's boyish "Hello!" Kitty knew that it was Phil.

The young woman's first impulse was to retreat to the safe seclusion of
her own room. But, even as she arose to her feet, she knew how that
would hurt the man who had always been so good to her; and so she went
generously down the walk to meet him where he would dismount and leave
his h