would love it because it would be hers and Manley's, and she could do with
it what she would. She bothered about that no more than she did about the
dresses she would be wearing next year.

Cold Spring Ranch! Think of the allurement of that name, just as it
stands, without any disconcerting qualification whatever! Any girl with
yellow-brown hair and yellow-brown eyes to match, and a dreamy temperament
that beautifies everything her imagination touches, would be sure to build
a veritable Eve's garden around those three small words.

With that picture still before her mental vision, clear as if she had all
her life been familiar with it in reality, she rode beside Manley for three
weary hours, across a wide, wide prairie which looked perfectly level when
you viewed it as a whole, but which proved all hills and hollows when
you drove over it. During those three hours they passed not one human
habitation after the first five miles were behind them. There had been a
ranch, back there against a reddish-yellow bluff. Val had gazed upon it,
and then turned her head away, distressed because human beings could
consent to live in such unattractive surroundings. It was bad in its way as
Hope, she thought, but did not say, because Manley was talking about his
cattle, and she did not want to interrupt him.

After that there had been no houses of any sort. There was a barbed-wire
fence stretching away and away until the posts were mere pencil lines
against the blue, where the fence dipped over the last hill before the sky
bent down and kissed the earth.

The length of that fence was appalling in a vague, wordless way, Val
unconsciously drew closer to her husband when she looked at it, and
shivered in spite of the midsummer heat.