u must have been horribly cramped, but it didn't strike Miss
Kinnaird, or she wouldn't have kept you there so long," she said.

"No," answered Weston, reflectively, "I don't think it would strike
Miss Kinnaird. She's English, isn't she?"

"Of course. But aren't you English, too?"

Weston's eyes twinkled.

"I am. Still, I don't want you to think that it's merely because Miss
Kinnaird comes from the same country that I do that I didn't expect
her to realize that to stand posed for an hour or so is apt to cramp
one."

Ida laughed. It evidently was clear to him that Miss Kinnaird regarded
him as a packer and nothing else, and had decided that he had probably
grown used to physical discomfort. Ida was, however, rather pleased to
see that he accepted the fact good-humoredly and did not resent it.
She was in no way astonished that he should answer her as he had, for,
in the west, a man may speak naturally to any young woman who
addresses him, without feeling called on to remember the distinctions
of caste.

"I wonder," she said, "whether you would tell me what caused the
trouble you were mixed up in two or three nights ago."

Weston's face grew slightly flushed, for he was still in certain
respects somewhat ingenuous; but he told her simply what had led up to
the affray.

"After all you could hardly blame the boys," he added. "They had had a
hard day, and it was not the first time Grenfell had done them out of
their supper."

"Still, he had spoiled your supper, too," said Ida. "If you couldn't
blame them, why did you interfere?"

It was rather a difficult question. Weston could not very well tell
her, even had he quite realized it, that there was in him a vein of
rudimentary chivalry that had been carefully fostered by his mother.
The males of the Weston line had clung to traditions, but they had for
the most part been those of the Georgian days, when very little
refinement of sentiment was expected from the country gentleman. The
traditions Agnes Weston had held by, however, went back to an earlier
age. She had been High Church and imaginative, a woman of
impracticable as well as somewhat uncomfortable ideals, and finding
her husband proof against them she had done what she could with her
son. The result was a somewhat happy one, for in the Kid, as his
comrades termed him, her fantasies and extravagances had been toned
down by the very prosaic common sense of the Weston male line. They
were full-fleshed, hard-ri