Silence enfolded the ranch house. All the little nocturnal sounds that noisy daylight blurs or blots out gradually became audible. Somebody walked across the upstairs hall in stockinged feet. There was a stamping among the ponies down at the corral. A little owl called sleepily from the willows over by the irrigating ditch. Hours afterward, when she wakened—this time on her bed in her own room, whither she had been carried and undressed in that sound sleep—she found a radiant being perched upon a table beside her pillow. Save for the presence of the doll herself, the child could never have believed but that the vision of last night was a dream. When later Uncle Hank explained to her, with her father’s assistance, that the beautiful Fort Worth doll had only been withheld from her the day before because it was a surprise, she accepted the explanation with a look and manner singular even for Hilda. There was something exultant in the seven-year-old’s bearing and in her thought. Her doll had a different origin from Maybelle Marchbanks’, or those that belonged to any other little girl in the world. Uncle Hank was not telling her the truth. It was not so, that her father had bought the doll. But her imaginative soul seized eagerly upon the spirit of the thing. All statements—and they were voluminous—concerning the importation and handling of Miss High Stepper (now Rose Marie) she understood to be figurative. This was not fact to which she was listening; it was poetry—parable; and she answered in parable of her own. She kissed them both passionately, and hugged the pretty doll to her with tears and with laughter, dwelling ardently upon each personal beauty and each separate elegance of attire; the arch, expressive eyes, the dainty tan shoes—all from Fort Worth; that is to say, all found and purchased in, and brought to Hilda out of the blessed country of Love and Good Faith. CHAPTER V POOR CHARLEY Hank Pearsall, used enough to the drinking that belongs with life in the western cattle country, the town outbreaks of hard-muscled cowpunchers who live under the open sky, watched with dismay the very different sort of drinking that his young employer indulged in. After that miserable Fort Worth episode and the arrival of Rose Marie, things were never quite so bad again. Charley eased up on the trips to town, and to the hard-drinking ranches. The Sorrows was already so crippled, its resources so reduced that a day of reckoning must certainly be at hand; but Hank knew that no more land was being sold, no more big sums borrowed on mortgage. And again Van Brunt made spasmodic efforts to interest himself in the ranch work. To the old man at this time Charley had the pathetic charm of a repentant child. The entire household management had slipped into the boss’s hands; Hank was but fifty-two, yet he seemed like an indulgent father with an incompetent son and his family in charge.