as soon as I'm
well enough he expects me to go to Chicago and take charge of the Western
office. Of course, I don't want to do that. I'd rather work out some
problem in chemistry that interests me; but I may have to give in, for a
time at least."

"Will your mother and sisters be with your father?"

"No, indeed! You couldn't get any one of them west of the Hudson River
with a log-chain. My sisters were both born in Michigan, but they want to
forget it--they pretend they have forgotten it. They both have
New-Yorkitis. Nothing but the Plaza will do them now."

"I suppose they think we're all 'Injuns' out here?"

"Oh no, not so bad as that; but they wouldn't comprehend anything about
you except your muscle. That would catch 'em. They'd worship your
splendid health, just as I do. It's pitiful the way they both try to put
on weight. They're always testing some new food, some new tonic--they'll
do anything except exercise regularly and go to bed at ten o'clock."

All that he said of his family deepened her dismay. Their interests were
so alien to her own.

"I'm afraid to have you go even for a day," she admitted, with simple
honesty, which moved him deeply. "I don't know what I should do if you
went away. I think of nothing but you now."

Her face was pitiful, and he put his arm about her neck as if she were a
child. "You mustn't do that. You must go on with your life just as if I'd
never been. Think of your father's job--of the forest and the ranch."

"I can't do it. I've lost interest in the service. I never want to go
into the high country again, and I don't want you to go, either. It's too
savage and cruel."

"That is only a mood," he said, confidently. "It is splendid up there. I
shall certainly go back some time."

He could not divine, and she could not tell him, how poignantly she had
sensed the menace of the cold and darkness during his illness. For the
first time in her life she had realized to the full the unrelenting
enmity of the clouds, the wind, the night; and during that interminable
ride toward home, when she saw him bending lower and lower over his
saddle-bow, her allegiance to the trail, her devotion to the stirrup was
broken. His weariness and pain had changed the universe for her. Never
again would she look upon the range with the eyes of the care-free girl.
The other, the civilized, the domestic, side of her was now dominant. A
new desire, a bigger aspiration, had taken possession of her.

L