"You didn't know Honoria when you saw her?" queried the father.
"No; I wasn't in the least expecting—that is, I—you may remember that I had never met her," stammered the young man, who had risen on his elbow among the pillows.
The older man walked to the window and stood looking out upon the distant mountains for a full minute before he faced about to say: "We might as well run the boundary lines on this thing one time as another, son. You don't like Honoria; you've made up your mind you're not going to let yourself like her. I don't mean to make it hard for either of you if I can dodge it. This is her home; but it is also yours, my boy. Do you reckon you could—"
Evan Blount made affectionate haste to stop the half-pathetic appeal.
"Don't let that trouble you for a minute," he interposed. "I—Mrs. Blount is a very different person from the woman I have been picturing her to be; and if she were not, I should still try to believe that we are both sufficiently civilized not to quarrel." Then: "Have you breakfasted yet—you and Mrs. Blount? But of course you have, long ago."
"Breakfasted?—without you? Not much, son! And that reminds me: I was to come up here and see if you were awake, and if you were, I was to send Barnabas up with your coffee."
"You may tell Uncle Barnabas that I haven't acquired the coffee-in-bed habit yet," laughed the lazy one, sitting up. "Also, you may make my apologies to Mrs. Blount and tell her I'll be down pronto. There; doesn't that sound as if I were getting back to the good old sage-brush idiom? Great land! I haven't heard anybody say pronto since I was knee-high to a hop-toad!"
Farther on, when he was no longer in the first lilting flush of the new impressions, Evan Blount was able to look back upon that first day at Wartrace Hall with keen regret; the regret that, in the nature of things, it could never be lived over again. In all his forecastings he had never pictured a homecoming remotely resembling the fact. In each succeeding hour of the long summer day the edges of the chasm of the years drew closer together; and when, in the afternoon, his father put him on a horse and rode with him to a corner of the vast home domain, a corner fenced off by sentinel cottonwoods and watered by the single small irrigation ditch of his childish recollections; rode with him through the screening cottonwoods and showed him, lying beyond them, the old ranch buildings of the "Circle-Bar," untouched and undisturbed; his heart was full and a sudden mist came before his eyes to dim the picture.
"I've kept it all just as it used to be, Evan," the father said gently. "I thought maybe you'd come back some day and be sure-enough disappointed if it were gone."
The younger man slipped from his saddle and went to look in at the open door of the old ranchhouse. Everything was precisely as he remembered it: the simple, old-fashioned furniture, the crossed quirts over the high wooden mantel, his mother's rocking-chair ... that was the final touch; he sat down on the worn door-log and put his face in his hands. For now the gaping chasm of the years was quite closed and he was a boy again.