“Well, that’s next to having nothing on your mind.  Say, you wouldn’t think I had the blues, would you?”

“Can’t say I should.”

“Well, I have.  I’ve been so homesick all day that I could go round the corner and cry if you—­if you hadn’t said I mustn’t.”

“What are you homesick for?”

“Oh, for the old ranch and the ponies and my dogs and—­and lots of things.  See the way the wind flecks the water over there?  Well, that’s just the way it does the grasslands back home.”

“But it’s such a parched, barren sort of a place, Wyoming.”

“It is not.  You ought to see it in the early spring, when everything is vivid green, and the cactus is in bloom—­the red-flowered kind that looks so pretty against the sides of the gray buttes.  Why, you can gallop for miles with your horse’s hoofs sinking into beds of prairie roses!”

“But it’s virtually green in England all the year round.  I’d like to show you a well-run English estate.  Rather a pretty sight.  Hascombe Hall’s a fairly decent example.  Some hundreds of acres, don’t you know.”

“Some hundreds!” repeated Bobby, scornfully.  “Our ranch covers two hundred thousand acres, and it takes Pa Joe four days’ hard riding to get over it!”

“Oh, I say, most extraordinary!  But if I were you, I wouldn’t think about home affairs,” said Percival, to whom her background in Wyoming was of no consequence.  He liked to think of her as having begun to live when she met him, and as gracefully ceasing to exist when they parted.

“All right,” said Bobby, resignedly.  “I’ve kept bottled up this long; I suppose I can manage the rest of the time.  What’s that book you’ve been reading?”

“Shelley.”

“Is it a love-story?”

Percival winced.

“It is poetry,” he said.  “I shouldn’t mind reading you a bit, if you like.”

She did like.  She evidently liked tremendously.  She listened as an inquisitive bird might listen to a strange wood note, with her head on one side and her bright eyes intent upon his face.

When Percival’s perfectly modulated voice ceased, she sighed: 

“I didn’t understand a word of it,” she said, “but I could listen to you read forever.  It makes me think of the wind in the trees, and all the lovely things that ever happened to me.”

“But don’t you like the poem?”

[Illustration:  “I like the way your mouth looks when you read it.”]

“I like the way your mouth looks when you read it.  Your chin’s nice, too, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Percival, with an unsuccessful effort at indifference; “it’s the Hascombe chin.  Been in the family for generations.”

“Think of having a chin as old as that!  Perhaps that’s what makes you so solemn.”

“Am I solemn?”

“Awfully.  Elise Weston says she believes you have been crossed in love.”

The hollow chambers of Percival’s heart reverberated with alarming echoes.  He shot a suspicious glance at Bobby, but her innocent gaze reassured him.