t eight inches wide for Miss Georgie's
accommodation.

"I can't sit anywhere," said Miss Georgie, looking at her watch. "By the
way, chicken, did you have to walk all the way home?"

Evadna looked sidelong at Good Indian, as if a secret had been
betrayed. "No," she said, "I didn't. I just got to the top of the grade
when a squaw came along, and she was leading Huckleberry. A gaudy young
squaw, all red and purple and yellow. She was awfully curious about you,
Grant. She wanted to know where you were and what you were doing. I hope
you aren't a flirtatious young man. She seemed to know you pretty well,
I thought."

She had to explain to her Aunt Phoebe and Grant just how she came to be
walking, and she laughed at the squaw's vivid costume, and declared she
would have one like it, because Grant must certainly admire colors. She
managed, innocently enough, to waste upon such trivialities many of Miss
Georgie's precious minutes.

At last that young woman, after glancing many times at her watch, and
declining an urgent invitation to stay to supper, declared that she
must go, and tried to give Good Indian a significant look without being
detected in the act by Evadna. But Good Indian, for the time being
wholly absorbed by the smiles of his lady, had no eyes for her, and
seemed to attach no especial meaning to her visit. So that Miss Georgie,
feminine to her finger-tips and oversensitive perhaps where those two
were concerned, suddenly abandoned her real object in going to the
ranch, and rode away without saying a word of what she had come to say.

She was a direct young woman who was not in the habit of mincing matters
with herself, or of dodging an issue, and she bluntly called herself a
fool many times that evening, because she had not said plainly that she
would like to talk with Grant "and taken him off to one side--by the
ear, if necessary--and talked to him, and told him what I went down
there to tell him," she said to herself angrily. "And if Evadna didn't
like it, she could do the other thing. It does seem as if girls like
that are always having the trail smoothed down for them to dance their
way through life, while other people climb over rocks--mostly with
packs on their shoulders that don't rightly belong to them." She sighed
impatiently. "It must be lovely to be absolutely selfish--when you're
pretty enough and young enough to make it stick!" Miss Georgie was,
without doubt, in a nasty temper that night.