Since seventeen the miller's wife had longed to see the sun set behind a mountain with snow upon it, and to see a cowboy with dust on his shoulders, like the cowboys of the western drama, come riding out of the glow, a speck at first, and on, and on, until he arrived where she waited and flung himself from his panting horse, neckerchief awry, spurs tinkling, and swept off his broad hat in salute. Beyond that point she had not dared to go since marrying the miller, who had dust enough on _his_ shoulders--unromantic dust, unromantic shoulders, goodness knows! But that was her picture, all framed in the gold of her heart. She wanted to see the mountain with the sun behind it, and the cowboy, and all, and then she could sigh, and go back to the miller and near Boston to await the prosaic end. For all of her thirty-eight years Mrs. Dorothy Mann was shy in proportion as her miller husband, the widely known J. Milton Mann was bold. That he was a hard-mailed knight in the lists of business, and that he was universally known, Mrs. Mann was ready to contend and uphold in any company. She carried with her in the black bag which always hung upon her arm certain poems bearing her husband's confession of authorship, which had been printed in the _Millers' Journal_, all of them calling public attention to the noble office of his ancient trade. Of course the miller was not of the party, so we really have nothing more to do with him than we have with the rest of the throng that arrived on the train with these singled-out adventurers. But his influence traveled far, like a shadow reaching out after the heart of his spare, pert, large-eyed wife. She was not yet so far away from him that she dared move even her eyes as her heart longed. In the manner of the miller's wife, there was a restraint upon the most commonplace and necessary intercourse with strangers which seemed almost childish. She even turned in questioning indecision toward June's mother before taking a seat offered her by a strange man, feeling at the same time of the black bag upon her arm, where the poems reposed, as if to beg indulgence from their author for any liberties which she might assume. June's mother, Mrs. Malvina Reed, widow of that great statesman, the Hon. Alonzo Confucius Reed, who will be remembered as the author of the notable bill to prohibit barbers breathing on the backs of their customers' necks, was duenna of the party. She was a dumpy, small woman, gray, with lines in her steamed face, in which all attempts at rejuvenation had failed. Mrs. Reed was a severe lady when it came to respecting the conventions of polite life, and June was her heart's deep worry. She believed that young woman to be in the first stage of a dangerous and mysterious malady, which belief and which malady were alike nothing in the world but fudge. When she turned her eyes upon June's overfed face a moisture came into them; a sigh disturbed her breast.