eth slept that night
Hugh's priority was met face to face by John Hunter's proximity.
Possession is said to be nine points in the law, and John Hunter was on
the ground. The girl had been shut away from those of her kind until her
hungry hands in that hour of thought, reached out to the living presence
of the cultured man, and her hungry heart prayed to heaven that she might
not be altogether unpleasing to him.

In the hour spent with John Hunter she had learned that he had come to
Kansas to open a farm on the only unmortgaged piece of property which his
father had left him when he died; that his mother intended to come to him
as soon as he had a house built; and by an accidental remark she had also
learned that there were lots in some eastern town upon which enough money
could be raised to stock the farm with calves and that it was the young
man's intention to farm this land himself. It seemed so incredible that
John Hunter should become a farmer that by her astonished exclamation over
it she had left him self-satisfied at her estimate of his foreignness to
the life he was driven to pursue.

Elizabeth saw that if John Hunter must needs run a farm that he would do
his best at it, but that he did not wish to _appear_ one with a role, and
being young and with her own philosophy of life in a very much muddled
condition, she liked him the better for it. Crucified daily by the
incongruities of her own home, she craved deliverance from it and all it
represented.

Just now Elizabeth Farnshaw was going home with something akin to fear in
her heart. She rated herself soundly for the useless advice she had thrust
upon her mother and for the entangling difficulties which her thoughtless
words had produced. That the union of her parents was unclean, that it was
altogether foul and by far worse than a divorce, she still felt confident,
but she saw that her mother was totally unable to comprehend the
difference between a clean separate life and the nagging poison dealt out
as daily bread to the husband with whom she lived; but she saw that
because of that very inability to understand the difference, the mother
must be left to find the light in her own way. In her desire to help,
Elizabeth had but increased her mother's burdens, and she tried to assume
an attitude of added tenderness toward her in her own mind, and puckered
her young face into a frown as she let Patsie limp slowly from one low
hill to another.

"I'll do everything