ouse and lectured me? I would not work! I would not--"

"You have worked a little--a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him
as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the
corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes
if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see
well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of
hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his attitude toward
her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly.

"Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my
umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself
around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical
appeal. Come on!"

His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as
they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings,
and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a
vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride,
his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.

"The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again.

But she refused even to glance at them this time.

"You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers
accept them as they do the noses on their faces."

"They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop!
I'll be up at dawn to stack it--and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am
an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!"

He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as
an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the
little flexible leather volume.

"How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp
of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will
you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear--a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying
His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer."

"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by
a terrific spree--a ride to the pass!"

He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and
suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock
masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt
that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air
from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever fo