ich he still believed to be
--Eden. At intervals I heard him murmur, "This is rippin'!"

After luncheon, Angela asked to see the ranch-house, and almost as
soon as we were out of hearing, she said with disconcerting
abruptness--

"Does your ranch pay?" She added half-apologetically, "I do so want to
know."

"It doesn't pay," I answered grimly.

"You are not going--behind?" she faltered, using the familiar phrase
of the country in which she had spent as yet but three weeks.

"We are going behind," I answered, angry with her curiosity: not old
enough or experienced enough to see beneath it fear and misery. Angela
said nothing more till we passed into the house. Then, with lack-
lustre eyes, she surveyed our belongings, murmuring endless
commonplace phrases. Presently she stopped opposite a photograph of a
girl in Court dress.

"What a lovely frock!" she exclaimed, with real interest. "I do wish
I'd been presented at Court. Who is she? Oh, a cousin. I wonder you
can bear to look at her."

Without another word she burst into tears, heart-breaking sobs, the
more vehement because obviously she was trying to suppress them. I
stared at her, helpless with dismay, confronted for the first time
with an emergency which seemed to paralyse rather than stimulate
action. Had I sympathised, had I presented any aspect other than that
of the confounded idiot, she might have become hysterical. Without
doubt, my impassivity pulled her together. The sobs ceased, and she
said with a certain calmness--

"I couldn't help it. You and your brother have this splendid ranch;
you have experience, capital, everything looks so prosperous, and yet
you are going--_behind_. And if that is the case, what is to
become of us?"

"I dare say things will brighten up a bit."

"Brighten up?" She laughed derisively.

"That's the worst of it. The brightness is appalling. These hard, blue
skies without a cloud in them, this everlasting sunshine--how I loathe
it!"

Again I became tongue-tied.

"Jim thinks it _is_ Eden. When he showed me that ugly hut, and
his sickly fruit trees, and that terrible little garden where every
flower seemed to be protesting against its existence, I had to make-
believe that it was Eden to me. Each day he goes off to his work, and
he always asks the same question: 'You won't be lonesome, little
woman, will you?' and I answer, 'No.' But I am lonesome, so lonesome
that I should have gone mad if I hadn't found someone--you