He had asked her to stay in Encinal County so he could see her—once again, anyway. She’d failed him. She hadn’t stayed. Well—but—she’d told him in that note why she couldn’t stay. And she fairly begged him to come right over to the Three Sorrows as quick as he could. Would he do it? And if he did.... How would it be when he came? At the lowest of her depression she had a sick, cold clammy feeling that what she’d done—hiding Pearse in the cyclone cellar, and never telling Uncle Hank all these years; keeping him out of sight when she met him that night at the camp-fire, and again when she saw him on the trail the day the rustlers were at the ranch; not admitting to Uncle Hank when he talked to her on the door-stone that there was such a person as Pearse in Encinal County, and that his presence was the greater part of the reason for her wanting to go to the Alamositas to school—sometimes all this arrayed itself against her and seemed unforgivable. Then she’d excuse herself—and Pearse—by remembering how long ago most of it was. He was different now. She was different. Yet it was a very pale, spent Hilda who saw, for the first time, the roof-lines of the little new station out on the western edge of the Three Sorrows, who got up and followed with dragging step when a porter jerked her valises together and started out with them. Uncle Hank was there to meet her with the buckboard. Well, it was a relief to have him to face—first. Uncle Hank was going to be the hardest part of it. She could deceive the others, if necessary; but she knew those kind blue eyes would look right through her. And that’s just what they seemed to do as he swung her down from the steps, searched her face gravely and said in a sort of subdued tone: “My, it’s a weight off my mind to have you here, all right, Pettie!” Then after another anxious survey of her pale cheeks, the lips that she couldn’t keep from quivering, the eyes that were only bright because of unshed tears, he finished on a falling note, “I got Lee Marchbanks’s telegraft about noon.” The trunk had been thrown off. The train thundered away. Now Burch rode in from the trail, swung down from his pony, and came across to give her the usual funny, bumping kind of Burch kiss and ask in blunt boy fashion as he picked up the valises: “What started you home all in a hurry before the term was over, Hilda? Not sick, are you?” She glanced sidewise at Uncle Hank, who was bringing her trunk to lash on the back of the buckboard, and got a little shake of the head, which showed that he alone had whatever disquieting information there was in that telegram of Colonel Marchbanks’s. “S’pose we leave sister tell us why she come home when she’s ready to say, Bud,” he suggested. “Reckon we’re glad to see her—whatever’s the reason. When folks get back ’tain’t polite, right at the first go-off, to ask too many questions, or so I was fetched up to believe.”