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e him, so of course I loved you at once." "And you never asked any questions?" Alice looked surprised. "Why, no; if father had wished to tell me any more he would have done so without my asking." "I am glad," Eleanor said, simply. "It is better for me to tell you myself." Mrs. Gorham paused, and Alice realized that this was not the time to interrupt. Eleanor seemed to be bracing herself as for an ordeal, yet when she spoke the words came with perfect calmness. "You were ten years old when your mother died," she said. The girl's face saddened. "Yes, just Pat's age now; and the next four years were so lonely until you came. I try never to think of them. Pat was too young to give me any companionship, so I was virtually alone with my governess. Father never realized my unhappiness. He was so busy with his own matters that, young as I was, I knew that he must not have mine to worry about." "Those were the years in which I suffered, too," Eleanor replied, quietly. "Perhaps that is what drew us so closely together from the first. Four years of torture!" she continued, more to herself than to the girl before her. "Why do you speak of them?" Alice begged. "Why not forget them, as I have tried to do?" "I do try, dear, but the play to-night brought everything back to me. How strange that we should happen on that particular one so soon after your father and I had spoken of those years! The 'Great Divide'--God only knows the human agony and truth those words contain!" Eleanor controlled herself before she continued. "It is a story which I have told only once before, and I had not thought to take any one except your father into its sad confidences; but you should know it, dear. My father's health broke down after mother died, and he was ordered West in the hope of prolonging his life. I was sixteen then, two years younger than you are now. We went to Colorado, on a ranch which father had bought upon the recommendation of a friend. How well I remember the first impressions I received of that glorious country: the exhilaration of that wonderful air, the inspiration of those towering mountains, the novelty of the strange new conditions! I rejoiced in the largeness of everything, and it seemed to me, those first few days, as though life amid these surroundings could but reflect the richness with which nature itself overflowed." Alice's eyes were fixed upon Eleanor's face with intense interest. The girl sensed
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