, she knew this league-long strip of shining sand much
better, it is to be feared, than the scanty flower-garden, arid and
stunted by its contiguity. It had been her playground when she first
came there, a motherless girl of twelve, and she had helped her father
gather its scattered driftwood--as the fortunes of the Millers were not
above accepting these occasional offerings of their lordly neighbor.

"I wouldn't go far to-day, Jenny," said her father, as the girl stepped
from the threshold. "I don't trust the weather at this season; and
besides you had better be looking over your wardrobe for the Christmas
Eve party at Sol. Catlin's."

"Why, father, you don't intend to go to that man's?" said the girl,
looking up with a troubled face.

"Lawyer Miller," as he was called by his few neighbors, looked slightly
embarrassed. "Why not?" he asked in a faintly irritated tone.

"Why not? Why, father, you know how vulgar and conceited he is,--how
everybody here truckles to him!"

"Very likely; he's a very superior man of his kind,--a kind they
understand here, too,--a great trapper, hunter, and pioneer."

"But I don't believe in his trapping, hunting, and pioneering," said
the girl, petulantly. "I believe it's all as hollow and boisterous as
himself. It's no more real, or what one thinks it should be, than he
is. And he dares to patronize you--you, father, an educated man and a
gentleman!"

"Say rather an unsuccessful lawyer who was fool enough to believe that
buying a ranch could make him a farmer," returned her father, but half
jestingly. "I only wish I was as good at my trade as he is."

"But you never liked him,--you always used to ignore him; you've
changed, father"--She stopped suddenly, for her recollection of her
father's quiet superiority and easy independence when he first came
there was in such marked contrast to his late careless and weak
concession to the rude life around them, that she felt a pang of vague
degradation, which she feared her voice might betray.

"Very well! Do as you like," he replied, with affected carelessness;
"only I thought, as we cannot afford to go elsewhere this Christmas, it
might be well for us to take what we could find here."

"Take what we could find here!" It was so unlike him--he who had always
been so strong in preserving their little domestic refinements in their
rude surroundings, that their poverty had never seemed mean, nor their
seclusion ignoble. She turned away to con