and care for her, but
Mr. Plummer refused to give her up, and he was right. He had saved her
when he found her a little girl alone in all those vast mountains, and
he was entitled to her. Don't you think so, Mr. Harley?"

"I do," replied Harley, with conviction.

"We yielded to his superior claim, but he sent her more than once to see
us. We loved her from the first, and we love her yet."

Here Mrs. Grayson paused and hesitated over her words, as if in
embarrassment.

"But it is not you and Mr. Grayson alone who love her," suggested
Harley.

"It is not we alone; in Boise everybody loves her, and at the mines and
on Mr. Plummer's ranches they all love her, too."

"I did not mean just that kind of love."

Mrs. Grayson flushed a little, but she continued:

"You are speaking of Mr. Plummer himself; she was his daughter at first,
and so long as she was a little girl I suppose that he never dreamed of
her in any other light. But when she began to grow into a young woman,
Mr. Harley--and a beautiful one, too, as beautiful as she is good--he
began to look at her in a different way. When these elderly men, who
have been so busy that they have not had time to fall in love, do fall
in love, the fall is sudden and complete. Mr. Plummer was like the
others. And what else could she do? She was too young to have seen much
of the world. There was no young man, none of her own age, who had taken
her heart. Mr. Plummer is a good man, and she owed him everything. Of
course, she accepted him. I ask you, what else could she do?"

There was a defensive note in her voice when she said: "I ask you, what
else could she do?" and Harley replied, with due deliberation:

"Perhaps she could do nothing else, but sometimes, Mrs. Grayson, I have
my doubts whether twenty and fifty can ever go happily together."

"We like Mr. Plummer, and he is a great friend of my husband's."

Harley said nothing, but he, too, liked Mr. Plummer, and he held him in
the highest respect. It required little effort of the imagination to
draw a picture of the brave mountaineer riding from the Indian massacre
with that little girl upon his saddle-bow. And much of his criticism of
Sylvia Morgan herself was disarmed. She was more a child of the
mountains even than his first fancy had made her, and it was not a
wonder that her spirit was often masculine in its strength and boldness.
It was involuntary, but he thought of her with new warmth and
admiration. Incited by