I wanted most and would never get. But
now.... October first! Listen. I promise you I'll not drink any
more--nor gamble--nor nag dad for money. I don't like his way of running
the ranch, but I'll do it, as long as he lives. I'll even try to
tolerate that club-footed cowboy's brass in homesteading a ranch right
under my nose. I'll--I'll do anything you ask of me."

"Then--please--go away!" cried Columbine, with a sob.

When he was gone Columbine barred the door and threw herself upon her
bed to shut out the light and to give vent to her surcharged emotions.
She wept like a girl whose youth was ending; and after the paroxysm had
passed, leaving her weak and strangely changed, she tried to reason out
what had happened to her. Over and over again she named the appeal of
the rancher, the sense of her duty, the decision she had reached, and
the disgust and terror inspired in her by Jack Belllounds's reception of
her promise. These were facts of the day and they had made of her a
palpitating, unhappy creature, who nevertheless had been brave to face
the rancher and confess that which she had scarce confessed to herself.
But now she trembled and cringed on the verge of a catastrophe that
withheld its whole truth.

"I begin to see now," she whispered, after the thought had come and gone
and returned to change again. "If Wilson had--cared for me I--I might
have--cared, too.... But I do--care--something. I couldn't lie to dad.
Only I'm not sure--how much. I never dreamed of--of _loving_ him, or any
one. It's so strange. All at once I feel old. And I can't understand
these--these feelings that shake me."

So Columbine brooded over the trouble that had come to her, never
regretting her promise to the old rancher, but growing keener in the
realization of a complexity in her nature that sooner or later would
separate the life of her duty from the life of her desire. She seemed
all alone, and when this feeling possessed her a strange reminder of the
hunter Wade flashed up. She stifled another impulse to confide in him.
Wade had the softness of a woman, and his face was a record of the
trials and travails through which he had come unhardened, unembittered.
Yet how could she tell her troubles to him? A stranger, a rough man of
the wilds, whose name had preceded him, notorious and deadly, with that
vital tang of the West in its meaning! Nevertheless, Wade drew her, and
she thought of him until the recurring memory of Jack Belllounds's