ing plainly in his hold. She did not notice it; she was
looking into his face which had softened strangely.

"Elizabeth," he said.

There was a sound of breaking glass, and a strong smell of liquor
pouring out upon the floor.

"O papa!" she cried, distressed.

He had sunk back against the pillows, pale with exhaustion. But when she
lifted the fragments of the glass, saying: "Isn't it a pity, papa?" he
only answered in his usual tone, "There's no harm done, my dear. I
don't believe it was just what I needed, after all."

He smiled with a new, indescribable sweetness and weariness.

"I think I could sleep, now," he said.

At noon Stanwood was quite himself again; himself and more, he thought,
with some surprise. He would not have owned that it was a sense of
victory that had put new life into his veins. Victory over a vulgar
passion must partake somewhat of the vulgarity of the passion itself.
No, Stanwood was not the man to glory in such a conquest. But he could,
at last, glory in this daughter of his.

As she told him with sparkling eyes of her beautiful ride through the
night, through the beautiful brooding night, her courage and her
innocence seemed to him like a fair, beneficent miracle. But he made no
comment upon her story. He only sat in the doorway, looking down the
road where he had watched her approach a few weeks ago, and when she
said, noting his abstraction, "A penny for your thoughts, papa!" he
asked, in a purely conversational tone, "Elizabeth,"--she always loved
to hear him say "Elizabeth,"--"Elizabeth, do you think it would make
Nick very mad indeed if we were to go snacks?"

"Mad as hops!" she cried.

"Then let's do it!"

Elizabeth beamed.

"And Elizabeth, there's no place like Switzerland in summer. Let's pack
up and go!"

"Let us!" she answered, very softly, with only a little exultant tremor
on the words.

She never guessed all that she had won that day; she only knew that life
stretched on before her, a long, sunny pathway, where she and her father
might walk together in the daily and hourly good-comradeship that she
loved.

IV.

AT THE KEITH RANCH.

The dance was in full swing--a vehement, rhythmic, dead-in-earnest
ranch dance. Eight couples on the floor tramped or tiptoed, as the case
might be, but always in perfect time with the two unmelodious fiddles.
The tune, if tune it might be called, went over and over and over again,
with the monotonous persistency of a saw