don't suppose I can convince you that I am very fond of you, and that
I shall feel badly if you leave like this?"

This was more like it:--Miss Rathburn lowered her beautiful lashes.

"You haven't tried, have you?" she asked softly.

She looked very desirable at the moment--pink and white and soft and
fluffy--all that the traditions of his family demanded in a woman. He
knew perfectly what was expected of him, and there was every reason why
he should ask her to marry him, and none at all why he should not, yet
somehow when he opened his lips to ask, "Will you let me?" the words
choked him. He said, instead, with the utmost cordiality:

"Don't you dare do anything so unfriendly as to leave without saying
good-bye to me. Will you promise to wait until I return?"

If she had obeyed her impulse she would have shrieked at him:

"No! no! no! Not a minute, if you go to see that woman!" She would have
liked to make him choose between them, but she dared not put him to the
test for fear that she would place herself in a position from which her
pride would not allow her to recede.

Beth wept in chagrin and rage while Disston rode away buoyantly,
marvelling at his own light-heartedness, tingling with the old-time
eagerness which used to come to him the moment he was in the saddle with
his horse's head turned toward Bitter Creek.

He had stubbornly fought his desire to visit Kate again. What was the
use, he demanded of himself sternly. She did not want to see him and
virtually had said so. She had changed radically; she cared only for her
sheep--even Teeters admitted that much. Anything beyond a warm
friendship between them was, of course, impossible. She was not of his
world, she did not "belong," and had no desire to. She could no more
preside at a dinner table or pour tea gracefully, as would be expected
of his wife, than Beth could shear a sheep or earmark one.

These things and many others he had told himself a thousand times to
stop the longing he had to saddle his horse and go to her. What a
weakling he was, he thought contemptuously, that he could not put her
out of his mind and do the obviously right and proper thing by asking
Beth to marry him, and so end forever this disquieting conflict within
him--a conflict that had not been in his calculations when he had
planned a happy summer.

It was physical attraction, he argued, together with the interest
aroused by her unusual personality, which drew him to Kate--a