d as to have the horse brought, I'll take
Piney's path. I'm going to the hills to try to find Piney and Uncle
Bernique. Think I'll sleep in the hills with them to-night. I feel so
sad. When may I come back?"

"Well, you see," the trouble crept into her voice again, misty,
tremulous--"you see, I may go away."

"Oh!" he cried, and then again, "Oh!" a bitter wailing note.

"Yes, I may," she said hastily. "You see, your friend, Miss Gossamer,
wants me to join her in Europe. She is very insistent about it."

"And you may go?"

"And I may go."

He knew that she said that she would see him again before going, if it
came to pass that she decided to go, and that she pressed his hand, with
the grateful look that she had bestowed upon him when she had tried to
thank him for holding on to her father in the Joplin mine; and that
afterwards she stole away through the garden, and a negro man-servant
brought his horse around to the rear grounds and showed him a
bridle-path to the river; but these things were hazy. The vivid thing
was an imprecation that by and by took awful form, like a monster of the
mist, hissingly, from between his clenched teeth:

"_Damn Miss--Europe!_"

_Chapter Eight_

WHEN A GIRL FINDS HERSELF

Sally Madeira went to her own room early that Sunday night. It was a
large room, sheer and white, with its wall space broken here and there
by cool, calm etchings, cows knee-deep in clover, sunsets on small
rivers, old windmills, wheat fields in harvest, hills where the snow lay
thick. When she had lit her lamp a rosy light suffused the room through
the tinted globe. The pictures on the walls looked so tonefully tender,
intimate, in the soft glow, that the girl, noticing them for the
thousandth time, moved from one to another, admiring and loving them.
They were, in a way, sign-posts of her development. She had begun to buy
them when she had stopped working in colour with a man who had a famous
studio in New York. One day she had gone with the man to an exhibition
of oil paintings which were infused with a matchless poetry of colour.

"If I paint all my life am I ever going to be able to paint like that?"
she had asked of the man earnestly.

"No, my child, you are not," he had answered, quite as earnestly.

"I wonder why I should try to do something poorly that someone else can
do so well?" she had mused.

And then, because she had talent, and, finest of all, an exquisite
temperament in whose pul