le with
what does not concern you."

Thus had an idol which Sheila worshiped been tumbled from its pedestal.
Sheila surveyed it, lying shattered at her feet, with moist eyes. It might
be restored, patched so that it would resemble its original shape, but
never again would it appear the same in her eyes. She had received a
glimpse of her father's real character; she saw the merciless, designing,
real man stripped of the polished veneer that she had admired; his soul
lay naked before her, seared and rendered unlovely by the blackness of
deceit and trickery.

As the days passed, however, she collected the fragments of the shattered
idol and began to replace them. Piece by piece she fitted them together,
cementing them with her faith, so that in time the idol resembled its
original shape.

She had been too exacting, she told herself. Men had ways of dealing with
one another which women could not understand. Her ideas of justice were
tempered with mercy and pity; she allowed her heart to map out her line of
conduct toward her fellow men, and as a consequence her sympathies were
broad and tender. In business, though, she supposed, it must be different.
There mind must rule. It was a struggle in which the keenest wit and the
sharpest instinct counted, and in which the emotion of mercy was
subordinate to the love of gain. And so in time she erected her idol again
and the cracks and seams in it became almost invisible.

While she had been restoring her idol there had been other things to
occupy her mind. A thin line divides tragedy from comedy, and after the
tragedy of discovering her father's real character Sheila longed for
something to take her mind out of the darkness. A recollection of Duncan's
jealousy, which he had exhibited on the day that she had related the story
of her rescue by Dakota, still abided with her, and convinced that she
might secure diversion by fanning the spark that she had discovered, she
began by inducing Duncan to ask her to ride with him.

Sitting on the grass one day in the shade of some fir-balsams on a slope
several miles down the river, Sheila looked at Duncan with a smile.

"I believe that I am beginning to like the country," she said.

"I expected you would like it after you were here a while. Everybody does.
It grows into one. If you ever go back East you will never be
contented--you'll be dreaming and longing. The West improves on
acquaintance, like the people."

"Meaning?" she said,