dear lambs of your flock. I saw two of them just now on the trail, fighting
over a lame donkey. The clans were gathering on both sides; there will be
a pitched battle in a few minutes. The donkey was enjoying it. I think
he was asleep!" The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patient
little schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense of
unavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as blood
follows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he had
done. "I am a brute, I believe,--worse than any of the pack. You have so
much patience with them,--please have a little with me. Trust me, I am not
utterly blind to your sufferings. Indeed, Miss Newell, I see them, and they
make me savage!" With the gentlest touch he had lifted her hand, held it in
his a moment, and then had mounted his horse and ridden away.

Yes, he _did_ understand,--she felt sure of that. What an unutterable rest
it would be if she could go to some one with the small worries of her life!
But she could not yield to such impulses. It was different with men. She
had often thought of Arnold's words that day at the spring, all the more
that he had never, before or since, revealed so much of himself to her.
Under an apparently careless frankness and extravagance of speech he was a
reticent man; but lightly spoken as the words had been, were they not the
sparks and ashes blown from a deep and smothered core of fire? She seemed
to feel its glow on her cheek as she recalled his singular persistence and
the darkening of his imperious eyes. No, she would not permit herself to
think of that day at the spring.

There was a bright light in the engineer's office across the street. She
could see Arnold through the windows (for, like a man, he did not pull his
shades down) at one of the long drawing-tables. He worked late, it seemed.
He was writing; he wrote rapidly page after page, tearing each sheet from
what appeared to be a paper block, and tossing it on the table beside him;