nto the great sunset glow that filled the saddle between two purple
hills in front of him.

As he swung round a bend in the road a voice, clear and sweet, came to
him through the light filtered air.

"Laska!"

A young woman on horseback was before him. Her pony stood across the
road, and she looked up a trail which ran down into it. The lifted
poise of the head brought out its fine lines and the distinction with
which it was set upon the well-molded throat column. Apparently she was
calling to some companion on the trail who had not yet emerged into
view.

At sound of his footsteps the rider's head turned.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Hobart," she said quietly, as coolly as if her
heart had not suddenly begun to beat strangely fast.

"Good afternoon, Miss Balfour."

Each of them was acutely conscious of the barrier between them. Since
the day when she had told him of her engagement they had not met, even
casually, and this their first sight of each other was not without
embarrassment.

"We have been to Lone Pine Cone," she said rather hurriedly, to bridge
an impending silence.

He met this obvious statement with another as brilliant.

"I walked out from town. My horse is a little lame."

But there was something she wanted to say to him, and the time for
saying it, before the arrival of her companion, was short. She would
not waste it in commonplaces.

"I don't usually read the papers very closely, but this morning I read
both the Herald and the Sun. Did you get my note?"

"Your note? No."

"I sent it by mail. I wanted you to know that your friends are proud of
you. We know why you resigned. It is easy to read between the lines."

"Thank you," he said simply. "I knew you would know."

"Even the Sun recognizes that it was because you are too good a man for
the place."

"Praise from the Sun has rarely shone my way," he said, with a touch of
irony, for that paper was controlled by the Ridgway interest. "In its
approval I am happy."

Her impulsive sympathy for this man whom she so greatly liked would not
accept the rebuff imposed by this reticence. She stripped the gauntlet
from her hand and offered it in congratulation.

He took it in his, a slight flush in his face.

"I have done nothing worthy of praise. One cannot ask less of a man
than that he remain independent and honest. I couldn't do that and stay
with the Consolidated, or, so it seemed to me. So I resigned. That is
all there is to it."

"It is