heroically altruistic acts performed, Martha proceeded, with the dryness that conceals a quick and kindly heart, to amplify her reasons for so doing. They were obvious reasons. Ann was too young, too much alone, too lovely to be cast suddenly upon a careless world; recklessness had been her habit. We were her nearest of kin; her only near relatives, in fact, for it was impossible to count as a relative her satyr-like father-in-law. Clearly it was our duty to offer her, here in this quiet, healing land, opportunity to regain some degree of poise; perhaps, although this was highly problematical, even to achieve a new and steadying perspective. You perceive we were idealists of sorts. People who love beyond measure certain countries are likely to be. They have immense faith in their curative powers-in the wide quality of the sea; the soaring quality of mountains. But we were not altogether idealists. Sturtevant Shaw was our concession to worldliness. All her life Ann, we knew, had been used to the attendance of the male-a sort of single-file triumphal procession; possibly a dim racial compulsion for adornment balked in the more primitive satisfactions of conch-shells and slaves. At all events, since marriage-and we had little doubt that Ann, in her own especial way, had loved her husband-had not allayed this thirst, there was little hope that widowhood would prove more effective. In Ann's social environment the mere presence of an habitual love was seldom allowed to interfere with the far more exciting pastime of falling in love. An innocent enough pastime, no doubt-certainly so we imagined in the case of Ann --but a pastime that none the less was a habit. And Sturtevant Shaw, picked from a visioned line of vacuous faces and debonair figures, seemed likely to be the least actively offensive figure of all; the most likely to supply Ann with the necessary piquancy devoid of tactless interference with a sorrow newly acquired. Besides, as a mere practical matter of self-protection, we needed some one to take Ann off our hands. The logical chain was complete. The personal question of whether we ourselves wanted Ann did not enter into it at all.

I wish I could accurately convey to you

my impressions when, a month later, in the soft violet of an August evening, I came upon Ann and Shaw on the platform of the little railroad-station fifty miles down the valley, whither I had been sent to meet them in person by a scrupulous wife. They were so exactly, my impressions, what I had imagined they would be. There are no eyes as sharp as those of the not too welcoming host. These two, Ann and Shaw, were so sure of themselves; so impeccable. One was aware how much they felt they were bringing delicate perceptions, civilized reactions, into an uncouth and to be patronized country. And all about them, you see, was this still, unending twilight, like eternity, and, to the east, the pregnant shadow of immense black hills.

They stood in the light of a station lamp, their baggage piled around them, Ann slim and pale in her black clothes, very aureate, and her companion short, bulbous, fashionable. He called me "old man" on the score of an acquaintanceship long since discontinued, and Ann, between almost every sentence, laughed the disconnected, unreasonable laughter of her kind. I put them to bed with a grim satisfaction in the notorious discomforts of the local hotel.

Wide countries, wild countries, seem to have an excellent sense of dramatic fitness; they rain upon one when rain will make for history; they snow when blizzards will heap up a story of adventure; they are beautiful when beauty is the impression desired; and the next day was beautiful beyond compare. There was a fine sense of gold and blue and scintillation. With us went the cool sound of mountain streams, the warm scent of firs under a summer sun. Our way led up over a divide and then down into the valley beyond. In upland meadows Indian paintbrush flamed amidst the blue smoke of lupin. But apparently, as yet, my guests were not prepared to concentrate their minds upon this gorgeousness of scenery. It was as if they had brought with them a bag of unfinished conversational odds and ends from which they busily drew forth embroidered personalities and scandals, worked upon them, put them back, and drew forth others. There was about this an atmosphere of duty as much as one of

a pathetic and unexplainable interest in mediæval art. He was even puzzled by his position and reason in the world, carrying with him a dim perception that his wealth and idleness were somehow adventitious, not quite to be taken for granted. One was reminded of a nearsighted, harmless bee blundered into an entangling web. And underneath his layers of ineptness I discovered one altogether decisive quality, he was entirely, splendidly, self-effacingly in love with Ann. He carried it like a sword beneath a cloak. I think the uncertainty this disclosure produced within me, the dislocation of my self-assurance, had largely to do with a change that at this time took place in my attitude toward Ann. If I had been so utterly wrong in one instance, there was a chance that I might be wrong in another. At all events, my mind, beginning to seal itself tight, opened ever so slightly to the possibility of new impressions. And then, unexpectedly, here was Shaw breaking his usual silence in regard to subjective matters; breaking it, for him, with startling lucidity. The immediate cause was, I think, a complaint on my part of Ann's habit of linking in the same breath sunsets and divorce; a disillusioning habit; a habit that frequently gave one the feeling of being pushed from a cliff into a quagmire. Shaw and I were riding home together into the gathering darkness, and I came to myself, as it were, to find him trying, intently, to convince me of something.

"No!" he stammered. "Not that! No! I don't know-it's hard to explain." His eyes sought the horizon in his effort to clarify his thoughts. "I wish I could make Ann clear to people," he continued. "Y' see, I've known her for twenty years -ever since she was a youngster." He laughed embarrassedly. "Sometimes," he said, "I feel more like a father to her than anything else. You believe that, don't you?"

"Yes," I answered, "I do." I hastened to relieve any misconception on his part. "I am not criticising Ann particularly," I added; "I am merely wondering about her type, that's all. It's a prevalent type. It's about three-fourths of our so-called upper class. They're like bright-winged

feverish and strident and apparently fortuitous. What makes them; what are they after?"

He looked taken aback by this sudden flood of psychologic questioning. "I don't know what makes them," he answered at length; "bad conditions, I suppose. But I dare say even grasshoppers have some purpose at the back of their actions. And these people are only trying in their untrained way to find the same few fundamental things that other people, better trained, know how to go after directly. I'm a grasshopper myself, you know."

I found myself voluble with the pentup irritation of a fortnight. "How the devil," I exclaimed, bringing my fist down on the horn of my saddle, can a woman who has been through what Ann has been through still remain what Ann is? Can you explain it? I think in place of the old virginal attitude about the body that used to be the fashion there's come a new perverted virginal frame of mind-not about sex! Good Lord, no!-but about life as it really is. A refusal to accept its poignancy; a desire to skim across its surface as if it were the thin edge of lava above a volcano. Was Ann in the least in love with Alastair?"

He nodded his head gravely. "Oh, yes," he answered, "greatly."

"I don't believe it," I rejoined. "Not for a moment. Ann and women like her are dried pomegranates."

He seemed shocked, but he was willing to admit that my remarks were, after all, meant as general ones. "You don't know Ann," he said at length doggedly. "I don't know her myself." He straightened up in his saddle and looked at me with an intent, brooding look. "Ann's changed, you know. Ann never was quite as feverish as she is now. Sometimes I think she must be afraid of something." "Afraid?"

"Yes."

"Of what?"

Inspiration deserted him. "I don't know," he said lamely; "I often wonder. But people do cover up fear with words, don't they? She's so determinedly hard, isn't she? As if she was afraid to let herself go; as if she was anxious to hang on

fat, too soft hands that trembled a little as he did so. "You don't get Ann," he concluded. "None of us do. We don't get any one ever but very clever, expressive people, and then we usually get them Nobody's a fool to themselves. And almost everybody over twenty-five's suffering like hell about something even when they don't clearly realize it themselves."

wrong.

Extraordinary, wasn't it? It set one to thinking why it is usually the disjointed, careless people who in the end achieve the kindliest, truest philosophy. But I was not to any extent convinced. wouldn't be so suddenly. I merely found myself studying Ann more closely.

One

There were about her certain obvious things worth studying. Her mouth, for instance. I recollected that on previous Occasions this mouth of Ann's had puzzled me it was a lovely mouth, thin, red, with the hint of a curve to one corner of it, apparently an adventitious mouth; a mouth much too likely to disarm critiCism. I congratulated myself, as I again recollected having done several times in the past, upon being proof against most toms of purely extrinsic pulchritude. Ann sat opposite me at meal-times, and at supper, beneath the descending light of candles under red shades, with which Martha had insisted upon decking the table of a Wyoming ranch-house, I had articularly excellent opportunity to obherve the lower half of Ann's face; the lower half, with that mouth striking upon The senses like the single note of a sudden all on a warm afternoon. One could not at remark, could not but be consistently mitated at the discrepancy between its sweet poignancy and the usual words that fell from it. There seemed here a striking instance of the lavish carelessness of name. I resented this lavish carelessness of nature; resented it increasingly; quite looked for, Ann heightened my perplesity. The incident was like the opening and closing of a lantern shutter in a dark room. Upon a certain night Ann Fame to me with a book in her hand.

Every one else was, I think, in bed. I was reading by the fire in the living-room. The great room, log-walled, hung with Ime, was very quiet and softly illumined.

.

"Do you think this is true?" she asked. I looked down casually, but not without some interest, for this was a new and quiet tone of voice on her part. My faint interest turned abruptly to astonishment; she was holding out before me the psalms.

You can imagine the incongruity of Ann holding out the psalms! Thirty years ago the Anns of the world would have known the psalms by heart, but not nowadays.

"Do you think this is true?" she insisted. "I had forgotten all about it." I read:

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

"If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.

"If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

"And this?" She indicated a preceding paragraph with her finger.

"Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it."

I twisted about in my chair so that I could look up into her face. For a moment her eyes opened wide into mine, then fell in embarrassment, like those of a child who has asked what may prove a foolish question.

"What do you mean, Ann?" I said.

Her words faltered a little. "I-I don't know exactly how to express it," she began. "I've never had anything like it to express before. It-it's the feeling that you are never any more alone

I don't mean people-but-at night it's as if there was no roof to your room at all, as if it was all open to the stars. Do you suppose it is what our mothers and fathers used to called religion?"

"I suppose so," I answered. "It's what they meant, even if they didn't feel it. Have you ever read 'The Hound of Heaven'?

She shook her head. "What a queer name!" she said. She gathered together her words as if afraid they might stumble too lamely. "You see," she explained, "it never used to be this way. I was al