--the only one he had ever written,
her--in her hands. As she read it over, part of its last sentence, "and
will, I hope, help toward emancipating you from care," struck her
attention, and her eyes filled with tears.

"What is it, mamma? What hurts?" Jack asked, always quick to respond to
his mother's moods.

"Nothing, dear, but Uncle Hugh's letter. He wrote it just before he died.
He was very kind to me," she said, patting the face thrust up for a kiss.

"Was--was my papa here then?" the child asked, curious about the life he
could not remember, and trying to relate things as he heard of them in
their true relation to the father who was a mysterious personage and
therefore interesting.

When his mother did not answer, he crept closer and, laying his head
against her arm, said wistfully:

"Mamma, will my papa ever come back to us?"

"I don't know, Jack," she answered quietly. "Perhaps. If he don't, you
shall go and see him when you are a big boy. Now run away, and leave mamma
a chance to think for a whole ten minutes."

The child ran off to the horses, and Elizabeth faced the life she led. A
curious thing was made plain to her in that hour--namely, that Hugh, whom
she remembered tenderly, was but a memory, while John Hunter, the father
of her child, whom she had no other cause to love, was a living force in
her life, and that at the child's simple question a longing flamed up, and
a feeling that she wished he were there. She remembered him as he would
ride with his hat in his hand, his fair, soft hair wind-blown about his
temples, and she would have been glad to go forth to meet him and try anew
to build a life together which would be livable to both.

A long time she pondered, and the impulse to write to him came over her,
but that impulse was followed by retrospection, and as one thing after
another arose out of the past in solemn procession, closing with the
unloved and unwished-for child which she had lost five years ago, she knew
that she would not open a correspondence. At that point, and with the
memory of the sweltering day and the unnecessary churning, her tender
memory of Hugh, who had made her free and economically independent, welled
up in her in one glad tide of thanksgiving, and she thought of her mother
and the thousands of other women on these Kansas prairies who had not been
saved from such a fate by being made independent landowners, and she
pondered on their fate till she longed for a way out