lue north the Great White Winter
stirred in its slumber.

As yet, however, the oaks and beeches still wore their liveries of
rustling amber, the short grass on hill-side pastures was intensely
green, flocks of thistle-birds disguised in demure russet passed in
wavering flight from thicket to thicket, and over all a hot sun blazed
in a sky of sapphire, linking summer and autumn together in the
magnificence of a perfect afternoon.

Miss Elliott, riding beside Burleson, had fallen more silent than usual.
She no longer wore her sombrero and boy's clothes; hat, habit, collar,
scarf--ay, the tiny polished spur on her polished boot--were eloquent of
Fifth Avenue; and she rode a side-saddle made by Harrock.

"Alas! alas!" said Burleson; "where is the rose of yesterday?"

"If you continue criticising my habit--" she began, impatiently.

"No--not for a minute!" he cried. "I didn't mention your habit or your
stock--"

"You are always bewailing that soiled sombrero and those unspeakable
breeches--"

"I never said a word--"

"You did. You said, 'Where is the rose of yesterday?'"

"I meant the wild rose. You are a cultivated rose now, you know--"

She turned her face at an angle which left him nothing to look at but
one small, close-set ear.

"May I see a little more of your face by-and-by?" he asked.

"Don't be silly, Mr. Burleson."

"If I'm not, I'm afraid you'll forget me."

They rode on in silence for a little while; he removed his cap and
stuffed it into his pocket.

"It's good for my hair," he commented, aloud; "I'm not married, you see,
and it behooves a man to keep what hair he has until he's married."

As she said nothing, he went on, reflectively: "Eminent authorities have
computed that a man with lots of hair on his head stands thirty and
nineteen-hundredths better chance with a girl than a man who has but a
scanty crop. A man with curly hair has eighty-seven chances in a
hundred, a man with wavy hair has seventy-nine, a man--"

"Mr. Burleson," she said, exasperated, "I am utterly at a loss to
understand what it is in you that I find attractive enough to endure
you."

"Seventy-nine," he ventured--"my hair is wavy--"

She touched her mare and galloped forward, and he followed through the
yellow sunshine, attendant always on her caprice, ready for any sudden
whim. So when she wheeled to the left and lifted her mare over a
snake-fence, he was ready to follow; and together they tore away across
a pastu