y father's
estate."

And when Matthews withdrew to join the Williams at the missionary
meeting, she burst into tears.

She went across to the window wondering about Wayland. She had not
seen him since early morning, before breakfast, when he called at the
sitting room door to arrange their return up the Valley next day. The
Williams and Matthews would go up in the buckboard. Would she ride
back up the hog's back trail with him? He would hire horses and riding
togs now if she would say? Yes, he knew it would be steep up grade;
but then, they could go it slow; he laughed as he said that. You see
the hog's back trail was fifteen miles shorter than the Valley road and
they could afford to go it slow; in fact, _very slow_.

"Come on in," urged Eleanor, throwing open the parlor door. "The
Williams are not up, yet!"

"That's why I came! No, I'll not come in: not much! I'm keeping
resolutions!"

She had not understood the wistfulness beneath his forced gayety until
Matthews told her all that afternoon.

"It will be our last ride: you'll come, won't you?" asked Wayland.

She had promised. Then, she had spent a most miserable morning. Why
was it to be the _last_ ride? She had not cared to go out. Though the
papers had suppressed all details of the cowardly assassination, the
glare of publicity had been focussed too keenly on her for comfort by
that explosion of the old frontiersman in the court room. She had
remained in all morning watching the motley crowds of a frontier town
surge past the hotel windows down the dusty hot main street, with its
medley of fine brick blocks, and poor shacks, and saloons, and false
fronts--little unpainted restaurants and cigar stands and gambling
places of one-story, with a false timber wall running up a couple of
stories.

"United States of the World," the old frontiersman had called this
country. Surely that was the true name of the wonderful new country
that had defied all traditions and mingled in her making the races from
every corner of the world! An immigrant train had come in. Eleanor
lifted the parlor window, and looked, and listened. Jap and Chinese
and Hindoo--strikingly tall fellows with turbaned head gear; negro and
West Indians and Malay; German and Russian and Poles and Assyrians. In
half an hour, she did not hear one word of pure English, or what could
be called American. Oh, it was good to be alive in this wonderful new
world under these wonderful ne