t buy her a night's
sleep!"

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world
might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him.

The reins slackened in Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a showily
painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are," he said,
turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."

They were met at the door by a thin, colourless woman, whom Gaylord
introduced as "My sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr.
Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him.

When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise,
feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
New York studio that he had always known. He looked incredulously out of
the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the
Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him. Suddenly his eye fell upon
a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became
clear enough: this was veritably his brother's room. If it were not an
exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in
various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before
the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In
every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest that the room seemed to
exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of
embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth,
a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The
_camaraderie_ of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep
lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and
cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the
world. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in
her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving
quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual _salutat_
to the world.

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and
his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A tall woman advanced
toward him, holding out her hand. As she star