homely, familiar ground, and she answered him with a heart grown suddenly light as his own.
Stephen Burns, meanwhile, rode on beside her, with no very distinct misgiving in his mind. He had, to be sure, been somewhat daunted once or twice before, by a curious, intermittent asperity in her, which he could not quite account for. Yet why should he expect to account for every changing mood in this uniquely charming being? Had he not perceived from the beginning that she was not fashioned quite after the usual pattern?
They had met, the previous autumn, in the quaint old New England town where his people lived. She had come like a bit of the young West into the staid, old-fashioned setting of the place, and he had rejoiced in every trait that distinguished her from the conventional young lady of his acquaintance. To-day, as they rode side by side toward the broad-bosomed mountain to the southward, he told himself once more that her nature was like this Colorado atmosphere, in its absolute clearness and crispness. Such an air,—bracing, stinging, as it sometimes was,—could never turn really harsh and easterly; neither, perhaps, could it ever take on the soft languor of
