"No, sir! I've quit that," Mr. Kinney objected. "I drawed the line there
some years ago, on account of my wife, the way she felt about it, and the
children growin' up. I quit when I was workin' round home, and now I don't
seem to miss it none. I git along jest as well. Course I have to cuss
a little sometimes. But I liked the way you listened to the old man's
warblin'. Because talkin' is a man's trade, it ain't to say he hasn't got
his feelin's."

As the hill cut off sounds of retreating voices and horseshoes clinking
on the stones, a stillness that was a distinct sensation brooded upon the
hollow. Daphne sighed as if she were in pain. She had taken off her veil,
and now she was peeling the gloves from her white wrists and warm, unsteady
hands. Her face, exposed, hardly sustained the promise of the veiled
suggestion; but no man was ever known to find fault with it so long as he
had hopes; afterwards--but even then it was a matter of temperament. There
were those who remembered it all the more keenly for its daring deviations
and provoking shortcomings.

It could not have been said of Daphne that her grief was without
self-consciousness. Still, much of her constraint and unevenness of manner
might have been set down to the circumstances of her present position. Why
she should have placed herself, or have allowed her friends to place her,
in an attitude of such unhappy publicity Thane had asked himself many
times, and the question angered him as often as it came up. He could only
refer it to the singularly unprogressive ideas of the Far West peculiar to
Far Eastern people. Apparently they had thought that, barring a friend or
two of Jack's, they would be as much alone with their tragic memories in
the capital city of Idaho as at this abandoned stage-station in the desert
where their pilgrimage had ended. They had not found it quite the same.