"They're back in town, you know."
"Yes; Teevan must have realized that old Kitty is getting on in years, and has a bit of money for Alden. Say, Sis, I hate to seem prying, but you don't—you're not thinking about Alden Teevan seriously, are you? Come, let's be confidential for twenty seconds."
She mused a moment, then faced him frankly.
"There's something I like in Alden, and something I don't. I know what I like and I don't know what I don't like—I only feel it. There!"
He reached over to take one of her hands.
"Well, Sis, you trust to the feeling. You couldn't be happy there. And you deserve something fine, poor child! You deserve to be happy again." His inner eye looked back six years to see the body of poor Dick Laithe carried into the Adirondack camp by two silent guides who had found him where a stray bullet left him.
She turned a tired, smiling face into the light.
"I was happy, so happy; yet I wonder if you can understand how vague it seems now. It was so brief and ended so terribly. I think the shock of it made me another woman. Dick and I seem like a boy and girl I once knew who laughed and played childish games and never became real. I find myself sympathizing with them sometimes, as I would with two dear young things in a story that ended sadly."
He awkwardly stroked and patted the hand he still held.
"Come and live with me, Nell. There's only a one-room cabin at that place now, with a carpet of hay on the dirt floor. But I'll have a mansion there next summer that will put the eye out of this shack at Bar-7. I believe in getting back to Nature, but I don't want to land clear the other side of her. You'd be comfy with me. And it's a great life; not a line of dyspepsia in it. And think of feeling yourself sliding off to sleep the moment you touch the pillow, as plainly as you feel yourself going down in an elevator. That reminds me, I'm going to bed down with the boys in the bunkhouse to-night. I'm afraid to trust myself in that bed upstairs again—I've lain awake there so many nights."