u please. I don't mind if he doesn't. What fine
horses. Aren't you conscious of a little qualm of regret, Clover?"

"What for? I don't know what you mean. Don't be absurd," was all the
reply he received, or in fact deserved.

And now it was time to go to the train. The minutes seemed long while
they waited, but presently came the well-known shriek and rumble, and
there was Rose herself, dimpled and smiling at the window, looking not a
whit older than on the day of Katy's wedding seven years before. There
was little Rose too, but she was by no means so unchanged as her mother,
and certainly no longer little, surprisingly tall on the contrary, with
her golden hair grown brown and braided in a pig-tail, actually a
pig-tail. She had the same bloom and serenity, however, and the same
sedate, investigating look in her eyes. There was Mr. Browne too, but he
was a brief joy, for there was only time to shake hands and exchange
dates and promises of return, before the train started and bore him away
toward Pueblo.

"Now," said Rose, who seemed quite unquenched by her three days of
travel, "don't let's utter one word till we are in the carriage, and
then don't let's stop one moment for two weeks."

"In the first place," she began, as the carryall, mounting the hill,
turned into Monument Avenue, where numbers of new houses had been built
of late years, Queen Anne cottages in brick and stone, timber, and
concrete, with here and there a more ambitious "villa" of pink granite,
all surrounded with lawns and rosaries and vine-hung verandas and
tinkling fountains. "In the first place I wish to learn where all these
people and houses come from. I was told that you lived in a lodge in the
wilderness, but though I see plenty of lodges the wilderness seems
wanting. Is this really an infant settlement?"

"It really is. That is, it hasn't come of age yet, being not quite
twenty-one years old. Oh, you've no notion about our Western towns,
Rose. They're born and grown up all in a minute, like Hercules
strangling the snakes in his cradle. I don't at all wonder that you are
surprised."

"'Surprised' doesn't express it. 'Flabbergasted,' though low, comes
nearer my meaning. I have been breathless ever since we left Albany.
First there was that enormous Chicago which knocked me all of a heap,
then Denver, then that enchanting ride over the Divide, and now this!
Never did I see such flowers or such colored rocks, and never did any
one breathe s