When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit of epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings and arrows of remorseful spinsterhood.  An obvious regret, or, at least, resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated at the hands of Kitty.  But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded pride!  He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, if possible, than when he had first known her.  Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow.  The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.

The tan and hardship of the prairie had adjusted the blunder of their ages.  Stark conditions had overdrawn his account perhaps a decade; she retained a surplus it would be rude to estimate.  Her greeting of him was radiant, her welcome panoplied in words that verged close to inspiration.  A woman would have scented warning instantly, deep feeling and the curled and perfumed phrase being suspicious cronies and sure to rouse those lightly slumbering watch-dogs, the feminine wits.  But Peter only turned the other cheek.  More than once, in the days that followed, he devoutly thanked his patron saint, caution, that his relations with Judith had been governed by characteristic prudence.  Kitty admitted him to her coterie, but he had lost nothing of his attitude of grand Turk towards her verses.  The sin be upon the heads of whomever took such things seriously!  The irony of fate that compelled a class poet to punch cows may have tinctured his judgment.

A telegram recalled him to the ranch and prevented a final leave-taking with Miss Colebrooke.  He made his adieux by letter, and they were frankly regretful.  Miss Colebrooke’s reply mingled sorrow in parting from her old friend with joy in having found him.  Her letter, a masterpiece of phrase-spinning, presented to Peter the one significant fact that she would not be averse to the renewal of his suit.  In reading her letter he made no allowance for the fact that the lady had made a fine art of saying things, and that her joy and regret at their meeting and parting might have been reminiscent of the printed passion that was so prominent a feature of magazinedom.  Her letters—­the like of them he had never seen outside printed volumes of letters that had achieved the distinction of classics—­culminated in the one that Judith had given him that morning, announcing that unexpectedly she had decided to join the Wetmore girls and would be glad to see him at the ranch.

That he had flown at her bidding, Judith knew.  What she would least have suspected was that Miss Colebrooke had received her visitor as if his breakneck ride across the desert had been in the nature of an afternoon call.  If Judith, knowing what she did of this long-drawn-out romance, could have known likewise of her knight’s chagrin, would she have pitied him?