This had all happened seven years ago. In the mean time he had adjusted his disappointment to the new life of the West. To say that he had fallen in love with the situation would be to misrepresent him. But the rôle of lonely cow-puncher loyally wedded to the thought of his first love was not without charm to Peter. How long his constancy would have survived the test of propinquity to a woman of Judith Rodney’s compelling personality, other things being equal, it would be difficult to hazard a guess. The coming of Judith from the convent increased the perspective into which Kitty was retreating. With the vivid plainswoman in the foreground, the pale-haired writer of verse dwindled almost to reminiscence. But the reverence for the usual, that made up the underlying motive for so much of Hamilton’s conduct, presented barriers alongside of which his previous quandary regarding Miss Colebrooke’s seniority shrank to insignificance. He might marry a woman older than himself and swallow the grimace of it, but by no conceivable system of argument could he persuade himself to marry into a family like that of the Rodneys—the girl herself, for all her beauty and rare womanliness, a quarter Indian, her father the synonyme for obloquy, her brother a cattle thief. Hamilton preferred that other men should make the heroic marriages of a new country. He was prepared to applaud their hardihood of temperament, but in his own case such a thing was inconceivable. Similar arguments have ensnared multitudes in the web of caution and provided a rich feast for the arch-spider, convention, the shrivelled flies dangling in the web conveying no significance, apparently, beyond that of advertising the system. When Peter went East, he had expected to find Kitty worn by the pursuit of epithets, haunted by the phantom of a career, resigned to the slings and arrows of remorseful spinsterhood. An obvious regret, or, at least, resignation tempered with remembrance, was the unguent he anticipated at the hands of Kitty. But alas for sanctuaries built to refuge wounded pride! He found Kitty the pivot of an adoring coterie, the magazines flowing with the milk and honey of her verse and she looking younger, if possible, than when he had first known her. Time, experience, even the pangs of literary parturition had not writ a single character on that alabaster brow. The very atrophy of the forces of time which she had accomplished by unknown necromancy seemed to endow her with an elfin youth, making her seem smaller, more childlike, more radiantly elusive than when she had worn the poppy hat at Cambridge.