planes."

"A lever?" she mused; "yes, perhaps. But levers are only links in the
chain binding cause to effect."

His smile was lovingly tolerant.

"Is that what your religion has brought you to, Ardea--a full-grown
belief in a Providence that takes cognizance of our little
ant-wanderings up and down the human runways?"

"Yes, I think so," she said; but she said it without hesitancy or a
shadow of doubt.

"I'm glad; glad you have attained," he rejoined quite unaffectedly.

"It was hardly attainment, in my case," she qualified; and, after a
momentary pause, she added: "any more than it was in yours."

"You think I, too, have attained?" he smiled. "I am not so sure of that.
Sometimes I think I am like my father, who is like Mahomet's coffin;
hanging somewhere between Heaven and earth, unable to climb to one or to
fall to the other. But I'm not as brash as I was a year or so ago; at
least, I'm not so cock-sure that I know it all. That evening in the
music-room at Deer Trace changed me--changed my point of view. You
haven't heard me rail once at the world, or at the hypocrites in it,
since I came home, have you?"

"No."

"Well, I don't feel like railing. I reckon the old world is good enough
to live in--to work in; and certainly there are men in it who are
better than I'm ever likely to be. I met one of them last winter out in
the Carriso cow country; a 'Protestant' priest, he called himself, of
your persuasion. He was the most hopeless bigot I've ever known, and by
long odds the nearest masculine approach to true, gritty saintliness.
There was nothing he wouldn't do, no hardship he wouldn't cheerfully
undergo, to brother a man who was down, and the wickedest devil in all
that God-forsaken country swore by him. Yet he would argue with me by
the hour, splitting hairs over Apostolic Succession, or something of
that sort."

She smiled in her turn. "Did he regard you as a heretic?" she asked.

"Oh, sure! though he admitted that I might escape at the last by virtue
of my 'invincible ignorance.' Then I would laugh at him, telling him he
was a lot better than his bigotry. But he got the best of me in other
ways. I owned the one buckboard in the northern half of Apache County,
and my broncos were harness-broken and fast. So, when there was a
shoot-up at the Arroyo dance-hall, or any other job of swift brothering
to be done, I had to drive Father Philip."

She was musing again. "You used to write me that you were on th