in its conciseness, and yet most womanly in its failure to give even
the remotest hint of the new and binding reason why he must not come.
And just before luncheon an obliging Cousin Billy was prevailed upon
to undertake its delivery.

When he had found Winton at the shale-slide, and had given him Miss
Carteret's mandate, the Reverend Billy did not return directly to the
Rosemary. On the contrary, he extended his tramp westward, stumbling
on aimlessly up the canyon over the unsurfaced embankment of the new
line.

Truth to tell, Virginia's messenger was not unwilling to spend a
little time alone with the immensities. To put it baldly, he was
beginning to be desperately cloyed with the sweets of a day-long Miss
Bessie, ennuye on the one hand and despondent on the other.

Why could not the Cousin Bessies see, without being told in so many
words, that the heart of a man may have been given in times long past
to another woman?--to a Cousin Virginia, let us say. And why must the
Cousin Virginias, passing by the lifelong devotion of a kinsman lover,
throw themselves--if one must put it thus brutally--fairly at the head
of an acquaintance of a day?

So questioning the immensities, the Reverend Billy came out after some
little time in a small upland valley where the two lines, old and new,
ran parallel at the same level, with low embankments less than a
hundred yards apart.

Midway of the valley the hundred-yard interspace was bridged by a
hastily-constructed spur track starting from a switch on the Colorado