Never had life seemed more fair and smiling than at the moment when
Aunt Jane's letter descended upon me like a bolt from the blue.
The fact is, I was taking a vacation from Aunt Jane. Being an
orphan, I was supposed to be under Aunt Jane's wing, but this was
the merest polite fiction, and I am sure that no hen with one
chicken worries about it more than I did about Aunt Jane. I had
spent the last three years, since Aunt Susan died and left Aunt
Jane with all that money and no one to look after her but me, in
snatching her from the brink of disaster. Her most recent and
narrow escape was from a velvet-tongued person of half her years
who turned out to be a convict on parole. She had her hand-bag
packed for the elopement when I confronted her with this unpleasant
fact. When she came to she was bitter instead of grateful, and
went about for weeks presenting a spectacle of blighted affections
which was too much for the most self-approving conscience. So it
ended with my packing her off to New York, where I wrote to her
frequently and kindly, urging her not to mind me but to stay as
long as she liked.

Meanwhile I came up to the ranch for a long holiday with Bess and
the baby, a holiday which had already stretched itself out to
Thanksgiving, and threatened to last until Christmas. People wrote
alluringly from town, but what had town to offer compared with a
saddle-horse to yourself, and a litter of collie pups to play with,
and a baby just learning to walk? I even began to consider
ranching as a career, and to picture myself striding over my broad
acres in top-boots and corduroys.

As to Aunt Jane, my state of mind was fatuously calm. She was
staying with cousins, who live in a suburb and are frightfully