acteristic prudence. Kitty admitted him to her coterie,
but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk towards her verses.
The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such things seriously! The
irony of fate that compelled a class poet to punch cows may have tinctured
his judgment.

A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-taking
with Miss Colebrooke. He made his adieux by letter, and they were frankly
regretful. Miss Colebrooke's reply mingled sorrow in parting from her old
friend with joy in having found him. Her letter, a masterpiece of
phrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant fact that she
would not be averse to the renewal of his suit. In reading her letter he
made no allowance for the fact that the lady had made a fine art of saying
things, and that her joy and regret at their meeting and parting might
have been reminiscent of the printed passion that was so prominent a
feature of magazinedom. Her letters--the like of them he had never seen
outside printed volumes of letters that had achieved the distinction of
classics--culminated in the one that Judith had given him that morning,
announcing that unexpectedly she had decided to join the Wetmore girls and
would be glad to see him at the ranch.

That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew. What she would least have
suspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if his
breakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an afternoon
call. If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out romance,
could have known likewise of her knight's chagrin, would she have pitied
him?

Ignorant of the recent anticlimax, and with a burden of many heavy
thoughts, Judith was penetrating a world of unleavened desolation. Beneath
the scourge of the noon-day sun the desert lay, stripped of every
illusion. Vegetation had almost ceased, nothing but sun-scorched,
dust-choked sage-brush could spring from such sterility. The fruit of
desolation, it gave back to desolation a quality more melancholy than
utter barrenness. Glittering in the sunlight, the beds of alkali gleamed
leper white; above them the agitated air was like the hot waves that dance
and quiver about iron at white heat. From horizon to horizon the curse of
God seemed to have fallen on the land; it was as if, cursing it, He had
forgotten it, and left it as the abomination of desolation. Judith scarce
heeded, her thoughts straying after first one then