avoided athletics during his entire college course.  In pursuing fortune westward Hamilton did not lack for chroniclers who would not have missed a good story for the want of an authentic dramatic interpretation of his plans.  His uncle, said they, who had put him through college, was disposed to let him sink or swim by his own efforts; or, again, he had quarrelled with this same omnipotent uncle and walked from his presence with no prospects but those within grasp of his own hand.  Again, he had taken the negative of a fair lady more to heart than two-and-twenty is in the habit of taking negatives.  Peter made no confidences.  He went West to punch cows for the Wetmore outfit; he was a distant connection of the Wetmores through his mother’s side of the family.

In those days Peter wore his rue—­whether for lady fair or for towering prospects stricken down—­with a tinge of wan melancholy not unbecoming to a gentle aquilinity of profile, softened by the grace of adolescence.  His instinctive aristocracy of manners and taste would have availed him little with his new associates had he been a whit less manly.  But as he shirked no part of the universal hardship, they left him his reticence.  He even came to enjoy a sort of remote popularity as one who was conversant with the best—­a nonchalant social connoisseur—­yet who realized the stern primitive beauties of the range life.

Judith’s convent upbringing had conferred on her the doubtful advantage of a gentlewoman’s tastes and bearing, making of her, therefore, an alien in her father’s house.  When Mrs. Atkins, who was responsible for her education, realized the equivocal good of these things, and saw moreover that the girl had grown to be a beauty, she offered to adopt her; but Judith, with the pitiful heroism of youth that understands little of what it is renouncing, thought herself strong enough to hold together a family, uncertain of purpose as quicksilver.

In those tragic days of readjustment came Peter Hamilton, as strange to the bald conditions of frontier life as the girl herself.  From the beginning there had been between them the barrier of circumstance.  Hamilton was poor, Judith the mainstay of a household whose thriftlessness had become a proverb.  He came of a family that numbered a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a famous chief-justice, and the dean of a great university; Judith was uncertain of her right to the very name she bore.  And yet they were young, he a man, she a woman—­eternal fountain of interest.  A precocious sense of the fitness of things was the compass that enabled Peter to steer through the deep waters in the years that followed.  But the girl paid the penalty of her great heart; in that troublous sea of friendship, she was soon adrift without rudder, sail, or compass.