trivial detail the news of the neighborhood, and repeated faithfully the
talk she had had with the mistress of the Cross-Triangle, answering all
her mother's questions, replying with careful interest to the older
woman's comments, relating all that was known or guessed, or observed
regarding the stranger. But of her meeting with Patches, Kitty said
little; only that she had met him as she was coming home. All during the
evening meal, too, Patches was the principal topic of the conversation,
though Mr. Reid, who had arrived home just in time for supper, said
little.

When supper was over, and the evening work finished, Kitty sat on the
porch in the twilight, looking away across the wide valley meadows,
toward the light that shone where the walnut trees about the
Cross-Triangle ranch house made a darker mass in the gathering gloom.
Her father had gone to call upon the Dean. The men were at the
bunk-house, from which their voices came low and indistinct. Within the
house the mother was coaxing little Jack to bed. Jimmy and Conny, at the
farther end of the porch, were planning an extensive campaign against
coyotes, and investing the unearned profits of their proposed industry.

Kitty's thoughts were many miles away. In that bright and stirring
life--so far from the gloomy stillness of her home land, where she sat
so alone--what gay pleasures held her friends? Amid what brilliant
scenes were they spending the evening, while she sat in her dark and
silent world alone? As her memory pictured the lights, the stirring
movement, the music, the merry-voiced talk, the laughter, the gaiety,
the excitement, the companionship of those whose lives were so full of
interest, her heart rebelled at the dull emptiness of her days. As she
watched the evening dusk deepen into the darkness of the night, and the
outlines of the familiar landscape fade and vanish in the thickening