t-of-doors. He
was sick of whisky and women and hot rooms full of tobacco smoke.

Withal it was necessary that he should go to Arriba County, follow up his
campaign of the preceding fall, arrange a timber sale if possible so that
he might buy land, and above all see that his sheep herds were properly
tended. This was the crucial season in the sheep business. Like the other
sheep owners, he ranged his herds chiefly over the public domain, and he
gambled on the weather. If the rain continued into the early summer so
that the waterholes were filled and the grass was abundant, he would have
a good lamb crop. The sale of part of this and of the wool he would shear
would make up the bulk of his income for the year. And he had already
spent that income and a little more. He could not afford a bad year. If it
was a dry spring, so that lambs and ewes died, he would be seriously
embarrassed. In any case, he was determined to be on the range in person
and not to trust the herders. If it came to the worst and the spring was
dry he would rent mountain range from the Forest Service and rush his
herds to the upland pastures as early as possible. He was not at all
distressed or worried; he knew what he was about and had an appetite for
the work.

One morning when he was in the midst of his preparations, he went to his
office and found on the desk a small square letter addressed in a round,
upright, hand. This letter affected him as though it had been some blossom
that filled the room with a fragrant narcotic exhalation. It quickened the
beat of his heart like a drug. It drove thought of everything else out of
his mind. He opened it and the faint perfume of it flowed over him and
possessed his senses and his imagination.{~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~}

It was a long, gossipy letter and told him of nearly everything that Julia
had done in the six months since they had parted "forever". The salient
fact was that she had been married. A young man in a New York brokerage
office who had long been a suitor for her hand, and to whom she had once
before been engaged for part of a summer, had followed the Roths to Europe
and he and Julia had been married immediately after their return.

"I give you my word, I don't know why I did it," she wrote. "Mother wanted
me to, and I just sort of drifted into it. First thing I knew I was
engaged and the next thing mother was sending the invitations out, and
then I was in for it. It was a good deal of fun being e