g the lack of
vanity in men's dress. But for the time being she was content to go
upstairs and be alone with her campaigning.

The man and girl climbed far that night in quite unbroken silence.
They had reached the crest of the first hill and stopped with the
higher ridges in front of them, black bulks filigreed with white,
before Barbara decided that she would have to make him talk.

"Aren't you going to say anything at all?" she challenged then.

She needed no explanation of his mood. To a woman there is no subtler
flattery than a man's dumb acknowledgement of her unattainability. He
talked when she bade him talk, but she was not positive whether she was
vexed or not because their conversation was of common-place things: The
work he was doing, upon which he was aggravatingly reticent, or the
severity of the last storm, or the amazing clarity of the night.
Certainty, however, was hers that he was no longer sure of
himself--that he was fighting silently against a growing conviction
that she was beyond his reach.

It made her very happily sad, somehow, and when Steve told her about
Big Louie and his horses, the sadness became a lump in her throat, and
a blur in her eyes which the man could not help but see.

"It is too bad," he said slowly. "I have been sorrier for him myself,
since his going, than I've been over anything for years. I do not know
just why, but I'm afraid for him. The others--" He stopped there,
catching himself before he had said too much. "I could always tell Big
Louie how I wanted a thing done, and know without one little bit of
doubt that he would stick to my orders. But that is the trouble with
his kind. Because he has no initiative of his own, he has to depend
upon the ideas which other men supply him. And there is no guarantee
whether they will be good or bad ideas."

From the first he talked fitfully that night. On other occasions she
had noticed how his mind seemed to veer, whimsically, from one topic to
another with little apparent continuity of thought, only to swing back
again, just when she was beginning to feel that she had lost the thread
of inference, to point his argument with parallels that were new and
delightful wisdoms to her ears. But to-night his grave-voiced
divergences, oftener than not, left her thoughts behind his thoughts.

"It is a very easy country to get lost in," he next remarked, when he
had had to insist that his sense of direction, and not hers, shoul