k to an opening
through which he could see the wild ruggedness and colors and
distances, his appreciation of their nature grew on him. Arizona from
Yuma to the Little Colorado had been to him an endless waste of
wind-scoured, sun-blasted barrenness. This black-forested rock-rimmed
land of untrodden ways was a world that in itself would satisfy him.
Some instinct in Jean called for a lonely, wild land, into the
fastnesses of which he could roam at will and be the other strange self
that he had always yearned to be but had never been.

Every few moments there intruded into his flowing consciousness the
flashing face of Ellen Jorth, the way she had looked at him, the things
she had said. "Reckon I was a fool," he soliloquized, with an acute
sense of humiliation. "She never saw how much in earnest I was." And
Jean began to remember the circumstances with a vividness that
disturbed and perplexed him.

The accident of running across such a girl in that lonely place might
be out of the ordinary--but it had happened. Surprise had made him
dull. The charm of her appearance, the appeal of her manner, must have
drawn him at the very first, but he had not recognized that. Only at
her words, "Oh, I've been kissed before," had his feelings been checked
in their heedless progress. And the utterance of them had made a
difference he now sought to analyze. Some personality in him, some
voice, some idea had begun to defend her even before he was conscious
that he had arraigned her before the bar of his judgment. Such defense
seemed clamoring in him now and he forced himself to listen. He
wanted, in his hurt pride, to justify his amazing surrender to a sweet
and sentimental impulse.

He realized now that at first glance he should have recognized in her
look, her poise, her voice the quality he called thoroughbred. Ragged
and stained apparel did not prove her of a common sort. Jean had known
a number of fine and wholesome girls of good family; and he remembered
his sister. This Ellen Jorth was that kind of a girl irrespective of
her present environment. Jean championed her loyally, even after he
had gratified his selfish pride.

It was then--contending with an intangible and stealing glamour, unreal
and fanciful, like the dream of a forbidden enchantment--that Jean
arrived at the part in the little woodland drama where he had kissed
Ellen Jorth and had been unrebuked. Why had she not resented his
action? Dispelled was t