d see him walking off in the yellow moonlight with his shoulders
back and his head up. He walked slowly, with an odd wading movement,
like a man walking through water. I was tempted, for a moment, to call
after him. But some power that was not of me or any part of me
prompted me to silence. I stood watching him until he seemed a moving
shadow along the level floor of the world flooded with
primrose-yellow, until he became a shifting stroke of umber on a
background of misty gold. I stood looking after him as he passed away,
out of my sight, and far, far off to the north a coyote howled and
over Casa Grande I could see a thin pennon of chimney-smoke going up
toward Arcturus.... Good-by, Peter, and God bless you....

Unlimited, indeed, is the power of Eros. For when I went to slip
quietly into the house, I found Whinnie and Struthers seated together
beside the kitchen range. And Struthers was reading _Tam O'Shanter_
aloud to her laird.

"Read slow, noo, lassie, an' tak' it a' in," said the placidly
triumphant voice of Whinstane Sandy, "for it'll be lang before ye ken
its like!"

_Thursday the Seventeenth_

The migration has been effected ... I am alone in my room, I have two
and three-quarters trunks unpacked, and I feel like a President's wife
the night after Inauguration. It is well past midnight, but I am too
tired and too unsettled to sleep. Things turn out so differently to
what one expects! And all change, to the home-staying heart, can be so
abysmally upsetting!...

We were a somewhat disheveled and intimidated flock when we emerged
from our train and found Duncan awaiting us with an amazingly big
touring-car which, as he explained with a short laugh at my gape of
wonder, the Barcona Mines would pay for in a week.

"It's no piker you're pulling with now," he exclaimed as we climbed
stiff and awkward into that deep-upholstered grandeur on wheels. He
said that the children had grown but would have to be togged out with
some new duds--little knowing how I had stayed up until long past
midnight mending and pressing and doing my best to make my bucolic
offspring presentable. And he told me it was _some_ city I had come
to, as I'd very soon see for myself. And it was _some_ shack he'd
corralled for his family, he added with a chuckle of pride.

I tried to be interested in the skyscrapers he showed me along Eighth
Avenue, and the Palliser, and the concreted subway, and the Rockies,
in the distance, with th