evidence of strenuous labors—­these all gave a different impression from his brief remarks about himself.  Lastly there was a little gray in the light-brown hair over his temples.  Glenn was only twenty-seven, yet he looked ten years older.  Studying him so, with the memory of earlier years in her mind, she was forced to admit that she liked him infinitely more as he was now.  He seemed proven.  Something had made him a man.  Had it been his love for her, or the army service, or the war in France, or the struggle for life and health afterwards?  Or had it been this rugged, uncouth West?  Carley felt insidious jealousy of this last possibility.  She feared this West.  She was going to hate it.  She had womanly intuition enough to see in Flo Hutter a girl somehow to be reckoned with.  Still, Carley would not acknowledge to herself that his simple, unsophisticated Western girl could possibly be a rival.  Carley did not need to consider the fact that she had been spoiled by the attention of men.  It was not her vanity that precluded Flo Hutter as a rival.

Gradually the conversation drew to a lapse, and it suited Carley to let it be so.  She watched Glenn as he gazed thoughtfully into the amber depths of the fire.  What was going on in his mind?  Carley’s old perplexity suddenly had rebirth.  And with it came an unfamiliar fear which she could not smother.  Every moment that she sat there beside Glenn she was realizing more and more a yearning, passionate love for him.  The unmistakable manifestation of his joy at sight of her, the strong, almost rude expression of his love, had called to some responsive, but hitherto unplumbed deeps of her.  If it had not been for these undeniable facts Carley would have been panic-stricken.  They reassured her, yet only made her state of mind more dissatisfied.

“Carley, do you still go in for dancing?” Glenn asked, presently, with his thoughtful eyes turning to her.

“Of course.  I like dancing, and it’s about all the exercise I get,” she replied.

“Have the dances changed—­again?”

“It’s the music, perhaps, that changes the dancing.  Jazz is becoming popular.  And about all the crowd dances now is an infinite variation of fox-trot.”

“No waltzing?”

“I don’t believe I waltzed once this winter.”

“Jazz?  That’s a sort of tinpanning, jiggly stuff, isn’t it?”

“Glenn, it’s the fever of the public pulse,” replied Carley.  “The graceful waltz, like the stately minuet, flourished back in the days when people rested rather than raced.”

“More’s the pity,” said Glenn.  Then after a moment, in which his gaze returned to the fire, he inquired rather too casually, “Does Morrison still chase after you?”

“Glenn, I’m neither old—­nor married,” she replied, laughing.

“No, that’s true.  But if you were married it wouldn’t make any difference to Morrison.”