all."

"Ahuh!" His tone held finality and bitterness, but he would not commit
himself. Columbine sensed a pride in him that seemed the cause of his
aloofness.

"Wilson, why have you been different lately?" she asked, plaintively.

"What's the good to tell you now?" he queried, in reply.

That gave her a blank sense of actual loss. She had lived in dreams and
he in realities. Right now she could not dispel her dream--see and
understand all that he seemed to. She felt like a child, then, growing
old swiftly. The strange past longing for a mother surged up in her like
a strong tide. Some one to lean on, some one who loved her, some one to
help her in this hour when fatality knocked at the door of her
youth--how she needed that!

"It might be bad for me--to tell me, but tell me, anyhow," she said,
finally, answering as some one older than she had been an hour ago--to
something feminine that leaped up. She did not understand this impulse,
but it was in her.

"No!" declared Moore, with dark red staining his face. He slapped the
lasso against his saddle, and tied it with clumsy hands. He did not look
at her. His tone expressed anger and amaze.

"Dad says I must marry Jack," she said, with a sudden return to her
natural simplicity.