shaft which rested on her drooping head. Roaring Bill walked softly up
behind her and put his hand on her shoulder.

"What is it, little person?" he asked gently.

She refused to answer.

"Say," he bent a little lower, "you know what the Tentmaker said:

"'Come fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter garment of Repentance fling;
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing.'

"Life's too short to waste any of it in being uselessly miserable.
Come on out and go for a ride on Silk. I'll take you up on a
mountainside, and show you a waterfall that leaps three hundred feet in
the clear. The woods are waking up and putting on their Easter
bonnets. There's beauty everywhere. Come along!"

She wrenched herself away from him.

"I want to go home!" she wailed. "I hate you and the North, and
everything in it. If you've got a spark of manhood left in you, you'll
take me out of here."

Roaring Bill backed away from her. "Do you mean that? Honest Injun?"
he asked incredulously.

"I do--I do!" she cried vehemently. "Haven't I told you often enough?
I didn't come here willingly, and I won't stay. I will not! I have a
right to live my life in my own way, and it's not this way."

"So," Roaring Bill began evenly, "springtime with you only means
getting back to work. You want to get back into the muddled rush of
peopled places, do you? For what? To teach a class in school, or to
be some business shark's slave of the typewriter at ten dollars a week?
You want to be where you can associate with fluffy-ruffle, pompadoured
girls, and be properly introduced to equally proper young men. Lord,
but I seem to have made a mistake! And, by the same token, I'll
probably pay for it--in a way you wouldn't understand if you lived a
thousand years. Well, set your mind at rest. I'll take you out. I'll
take you back to your stamping-ground if that's what you crave. Ye
gods and little fishes, but I have sure been a fool!"

He sat down on the edge of the table, and Hazel blinked at him, half
scared, and full of wonder. She had grown so used to seeing him calm,
imperturbable, smiling cheerfully no matter what she said or did, that
his passionate outbreak amazed her. She could only sit and look at him.

He got out his cigarette materials. But his fingers trembled, spilling
the tobacco. And when he tore the paper in his efforts to roll it, he
dashed paper and all in