ght; how many times had she
admitted that to herself? But as individuals . . . Oh, how she hated
them! And to-day, for some reason not clearly defined in Terry's
consciousness, she found it convenient to assure herself with new
emphasis that she hated and despised the Packards with a growing
detestation, and from this point to go on and inform Miss Teresa Temple
exactly why she looked on those of the Packard blood just as she did.

She summoned a host of reasons, set them in ranks like so many soldiers
to wage war for her, marshalled and deployed and reviewed and
dress-paraded them, and found them all eminently satisfactory
mercenaries.

There was one reason which she thrust into the background, seeking to
keep it hidden behind the serried ranks of its brothers-in-arms. And
yet it insisted in mutinous fashion on pushing to the fore. Seeking to
consider the Packards en masse, as a curse rather than as individuals,
she found that she was remembering Steve Packard rather vividly.

In the outward seeming Steve Packard was a gentleman; he had that vague
something called culture; he bore himself with the assurance and ease
of one who knew the world; he had been to college--and Terry knew
nothing more of school than was to be learned at a country high school.
Steve's father had "broken" her father financially; had such not been
the fact Terry herself would have had her own college diploma on her
wall; Terry would have known something more of the world than she now
knew; she would have been "a lady."

"Oh, pickles!" cried Terry aloud, bringing her runaway thoughts to a
sharp halt. "What difference does it make if he knows Latin and I
don't? And a hot specimen of a 'lady' I'd make anyhow!"

Over a ridge she flew, the low sun glistening from her spurs and the
polished surfaces of her boot-tops, down into the dusk-filled fragrance
of a woodsy canon, into the mouth of a silent trail, around a wide
curve, and to her own favorite spot of all these woods. A nook of
haunting charm with its sprawling stream, its big-boled and widely
scattered trees, its grass and flowers. "Mossy Dell," she called it,
having borrowed the name from an old romance read in breathless fashion
in her room.

Slipping out of her saddle and leaving her horse to browse if such
pastime suited him, Terry went through the trees and down along the
flashing creek, humming softly, her voice confused with the gurgle of
the noisy little stream, her eyes a