"Make you wonder what?" he asked in his quiet, well modulated voice. A flush came over her face. Her eyes shifted from his until they rested upon the grave at her feet. The breeze threw a loose strand of dark hair across one eye. She rapidly drew her hand over her forehead, putting it away from her vision, then looked full and straight at the man beside her. "I beg your pardon; I cannot finish what was in my mind to say. I forgot, Mr. Livingston, that we are comparative strangers." "I am sorry, then, that you remember it," he replied. "It never seemed to me that we were strangers, Miss Hathaway. I do not think so now. There is something, I know not what, that draws people to each other in this country. It does not take weeks or months or years to form a friendship here. Two people meet, they speak, look into one another's eyes, then they are friends, comrades--or nothing, as it sometimes happens. They decide quickly here, not hampered by stiff conventionalities. It is instinct guides. Are you different from your countrymen?" "No," she replied quickly. "Not in that one thing, at least. To be honest, I have never _felt_ that you were a stranger to me; but a girl, even a rough Western girl, must sometimes remember and be restricted by conventionalities. I know what you are thinking, that conventionalities include politeness, and I have been rude to you. Perhaps that is the reason I wouldn't let you go back to Harris' with me the other night--I had not known you long enough." He answered her simply: "I am not thinking of that night, but that you have just told me you are my friend--that you think kindly of me." She flashed him a look of surprise. "But I _never_ told you that!" she exclaimed. "Not in just those words, true," he said. "But it is so. Didn't you say that you had never felt me to be a _stranger_ to you? If you had not approved of me--thought kindly of me in the start, could you have felt so? No. When two people meet, they are friends, or they are still strangers--and _you have never felt me to be a stranger_. Is that not so?" "I cannot deny what I have just said," she replied. "And I will not deny that I believed what I was saying, but your argument, though good, doesn't down me, because I honestly think that a person may see another person just once, feel that he never could be a stranger, and yet have no earthly regard or respect for that person." "Have you ever experienced that?" he inquired. "N--no. You are trying to corner me; but that isn't what I came to talk about, and it is time to go," she said, turning away from the grave. He walked with her down the hill toward her horse. "I wanted to ask you, Mr. Livingston, about the little German girl," she said, standing with her back against the side of her horse, one arm around the pommel loosely holding the reins, and the other stretched upon the glossy back of the gentle animal. "When are you expecting her, and what are you going to do about her?"