ghter, good-humor, and exuberant
youth. Of all the women he ever had known, either well or casually, she
had seemed the farthest from moods or nerves or anything even dimly
suggestive of the neurasthenic.

Moved by an impulse Van Lennop laid down his book and went below.

"Air-castles, Miss Tisdale?" he asked as he sauntered toward her. He
still insisted upon the whimsical formality of "Miss Tisdale," although
to all Crowheart, naturally, she was "Essie."

The girl lifted her sombre eyes at the sound of his voice and the shadow
in them gave them the look of deep blue velvet, Van Lennop thought.

"You only build air-castles when you are happy, don't you? and hopeful?"

"And are you not happy and hopeful, Miss Tisdale?" Amusement glimmered
in his eyes. "I thought you were quite the happiest person I know, and
to be happy is to be hopeful."

"What have I to make me happy?" she demanded with an intensity which
startled him. "What have I to hope for?"

"Fishing, Miss Tisdale?" He still smiled at her.

"For what? To be told that I'm pretty?"

"And young," Van Lennop supplemented. "I know women who would give a
king's ransom to be young and pretty. Isn't that enough to make one
person happy?"

"And what good will being either ever do me?" she demanded bitterly;
"me, a biscuit-shooter!" Her musical voice was almost harsh in its
bitterness. She turned upon him fiercely. "I've been happy because I was
ignorant, but I've been enlightened; I've been made to see; I've been
shown my place!"

That was it then; some one had hurt her, some one had found it in his
heart to hurt Essie Tisdale whose friendliness was as impartial and as
boundless as the sunshine itself. He looked at her inquiringly and she
went on--

"Don't you think I see what's ahead of me? It's as plain as though it
had happened and there's nothing else possible for me."

"And what is it?" he asked gently.

"There'll come a day when I'm tired and discouraged and utterly,
utterly hopeless that some cowpuncher will ask me to marry him and I'll
say yes. Then he'll file on a homestead away off somewhere in the
foothills where the range is good and there's no sheep and it's fifty
miles to a neighbor and a two days' trip to town." She stared straight
ahead as though visualizing the picture. "He'll build a log house with a
slat bunk in one end and set up a camp-stove with cracked lids in the
other. There'll be a home-made table with a red oilcloth table cover a