charm, she has been told, and she sings at—­you can’t really call it singing—­two or three of the old Scotch songs of homely sentiment like the Scotch seem to get into their songs as no other nation can, or doesn’t he think so, and he does, indeed.  And he’s reading a wonderful new novel in which there is much of Nature with its lessons for each of us, but in which love conquers all at the end, and the girl in it reminds him strongly of her, and perhaps she’ll be good enough to sing for him—­just for him alone in the dusk—­if he brings this book up to-morrow night so he can show her some good places in it.

“At first she is sure she has a horrid old engagement for to-morrow night and is so sorry, but another time, perhaps—­Ain’t it a marvel the crooked tricks that girl had learned in one day!  And then she remembers that her engagement is for Tuesday night—­what could she have been thinking of!—­and come by all means—­only too charmed—­and how rarely nowadays does one meet one on one’s own level of culture, or perhaps that is too awful a word to use—­so hackneyed—­but anyway he knows what she means, or doesn’t he?  He does.

“Pretty soon she gets up and goes over to her horse, picking her way daintily in the silly little tan pumps, and seems to be offering the beast something.  The stricken man follows her the second he can without being too raw about it, and there is the adorably feminine thing with a big dill pickle, two deviled eggs, and a half of one of these Camelbert cheeses for her horse.  Mr. D. has a good masterly laugh at her idea of horse fodder and calls her ‘But, my dear child!’ and she looks prettily offended and offers this chuck to the horse and he gulps it all down and noses round for more of the same.  It was an old horse named Croppy that she’d known from childhood and would eat anything on earth.  She rode him up here once and he nabbed a bar of laundry soap off the back porch and chewed the whole thing down with tears of ecstasy in his eyes and frothing at the mouth like a mad dog.  Well, so Hetty gives mister man a look of dainty superiority as she flicks crumbs from her white fingers with my real lace handkerchief, and he stops his hearty laughter and just stares, and she says what nonsense to think the poor horses don’t like food as well as any one.  Them little moments have their effect on a man in a certain condition.  He knew there probably wasn’t another horse in the world would touch that truck, but he couldn’t help feeling a strange new respect for her in addition to that glorious masculine protection she’d had him wallowing in all day.

“The ride home, at least on the part of the Non Plush Ultra cut-ups, was like they had laid a loved one to final rest out there on the lone mountainside.  The handsome stranger and Hetty brought up the rear, conversing eagerly about themselves and other serious topics.  I believe he give her to understand that he’d been pretty wild at one time in his life and wasn’t any too darned well over it yet, but that some good womanly woman who would study his ways could still take him and make a man of him; and her answering that she knew he must have suffered beyond human endurance in that horrible conflict with his lower nature.  He said he had.