“Couldn’t he see what a sacrifice it meant to you?” Alice asked.

“No, dear; you must remember that, in his way, Ralph was an attractive fellow.  He had been successful with his ranch; he was agreeable and intelligent; his Western boldness, as it seemed to me, was at times tempered with a certain gentleness hardly to be expected in a man of his nature; and, all in all, he was a man to whom any girl could at least give respect, and affection might come later.  It meant settling down in the West for the rest of my life, but this was inevitable, anyway.  I must forget the old friends and the old associations, and could I not do this better with a husband’s help than alone?  I asked myself a thousand questions and ended by deciding that I would marry him.

“It was a short courtship—­delay was a word not found in Ralph Buckner’s vocabulary.  We were married and began our life at his ranch, which, as I say, was near enough to my father so that we could be in frequent communication.  He had been much concerned about me, having discovered more of my homesickness for the East than I had realized, so to see me well settled and apparently happy relieved him of a heavy load.”

“But you weren’t happy even at first,” Alice insisted.  “How could you be?”

“I say ‘apparently happy,’ dear, for that was all it was.  Ralph did what he could for me in his own way, so at first it was perhaps my fault that we were not more congenial; but his ways were not my ways, and I kept looking for what was not there.  He was well-born, but his life on the ranch for so many years had dulled his appreciation of those finer, innate qualities which every wife craves—­he had forgotten how to be the gentleman.  Don’t think that I expected the impossible, or anything incongruous to the life we were leading; but there are little attentions, thoughtful considerations and other things in a husband’s relation to his wife, trivial perhaps in themselves, which the wife expects and misses if she does not receive—­the more so, if she has deluded herself into believing that the instincts for them are inborn, and only require her suggestion to develop and bring them to fruition.  These qualities he had seemed to show before we were married, but they proved to be only a veneer which soon wore off.”

“Why do you bring this all back now ?” Alice asked, sympathetically, seeing the lines deepen in Eleanor’s face.

“I must tell it to you, dear—­we have grown so close that I feel this is all that remains between us.  When you know this, we shall be sisters indeed.”

“We are that already and more,” Alice urged.  “Only think how near of an age we really are.”

“In years, yes; but sometimes I feel as if I had already lived centuries.”

“Will the telling of this take a few of those centuries from you?” the girl inquired, smiling.