Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/348

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"No; but how did you know it was I?"

"Why, I knew all about it, of course. Fanny told me, and Mrs. Dick Dayton wrote home, and,—well, I knew about it a great deal better than anybody else!"

"And you knew I was up here?"

"Of course I did! Why, else, should I have come up at daybreak?"

"But, Dorothy," Wakefield persisted, determined to make a clean breast of it at the outset. "Did you know I had made a fizzle of everything out here?"

"I knew you had lost your money," she replied, with an air of misprizing such sordid considerations. "And Fanny told me you were going to California, and,—I just thought I would come out with the Dennimans!" she added irrelevantly.

He was walking beside her horse up the broad clean road he had once taken such pride in;—ages ago he thought it must have been. On either hand, the solemn cliffs, familiars of the past three months, stood decked with gleaming bits of color; the brook went careering in their shadow, calling and crooning its little tale. What was that over yonder under the big pine-tree? Only a pair of bright eyes, that twinkled curiously, then vanished in a