"Oh, I'm too tired to talk, riding around trying to find those cattle--and just as I was tired out we saw them coming, away out on The Rolls. Lucy, do put on your riding habit and go back on Pinto--you haven't been out of the house to-day!" As half an hour later Lucy Ware trotted obediently away, riding up the canyon toward the distant bawling of cattle, Kitty turned suddenly upon Hardy with half-closed, accusing eyes. "You seem to be very happy with Lucy," she said, with an aggrieved smile. "But why," she continued, with quickening animus, "why should you seek to avoid me? Isn't it enough that I should come clear down here to see you? But when I want to have a word with you after our long silence I have to scheme and manage like a gypsy!" She paused, and flicked her booted leg with the lash of a horsehair quirt, glancing at him furtively with eyes that drooped with an appealing sadness. "If I had known how hard-hearted you could be," she said, after a silence, "I should never have spoken as I did, if the words choked me. But now that I have come part way and offered my poor friendship again, you might--oh Rufus, how could you be so inconsiderate! No one can ever know what I suffered when you left that way. Every one knew we were the best of friends, and several people even knew that you had been to see me. And then, without a word, without a sign, with no explanation, to leave and be gone for years--think what they must have thought! Oh, it was too humiliating!" She paused again, and to Hardy's apprehensive eyes she seemed on the verge of tears. So he spoke, blindly and without consideration, filled with a man's anxiety to stave off this final catastrophe. "I'm sorry," he began, though he had never meant to say it, "but--but there was nothing else to do! You--you told me to go. You said you never wanted to see me again, and--you were not very kind to me, then." He paused, and at the memory of those last words of hers, uttered long ago, the flush of shame mantled his cheeks. "Every man has his limit," he said bluntly, "and I am no dog, to be scolded and punished and sent away. I have been ashamed many times for what I did, but I had to keep my own respect--and so I left. Is it too much for a man to go away when he is told?" Kitty Bonnair fixed him with her dark eyes and shook her head sadly.