He stood looking at her in a peculiar, yet half-resigned way, and held
out his hand. For a moment she hesitated. Had he been less independent
and strong, she would have refused to let him go--have offered him
some slight employment at the ranch; for oddly enough, in spite of the
suspicion that he was concealing something, she felt that she would have
trusted him, and he would have been a help to her. But he was not only
determined, but SHE was all the time conscious that he was a totally
different man from the one she had taken care of, and merely ordinary
prudence demanded that she should know something more of him first. She
gave him her hand constrainedly; he pressed it warmly.

Dr. Duchesne drove up, helped him into the buggy, smiled a good-natured
but half-perfunctory assurance that he would look after "her patient,"
and drove away.

The whole thing was over, but so unexpectedly, so suddenly, so
unromantically, so unsatisfactorily, that, although her common sense
told her that it was perfectly natural, proper, business-like, and
reasonable, and, above all, final and complete, she did not know whether
to laugh or be angry. Yet this was her parting from the man who had but
a few days ago moved her to tears with a single hopeless gesture.
Well, this would teach her what to expect. Well, what had she expected?
Nothing!

Yet for the rest of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the
conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly
just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his
prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the
recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she
rated that trusted retainer with such pitiless equity and unfeminine