Louise changed her tactics. She took Mary on long walks over the prairie, endeavoring to fatigue her into sleep. The length of these jaunts grew gradually and systematically. It came at last to be an established order of the day for the two girls to strike off early, with a box of luncheon strapped over Louise’s shoulder, for—nowhere in particular, but always somewhere that consumed the better part of the day in the going and coming. Sometimes the hills and bluffs of the river region drew them. Sometimes a woman’s whim made them hold to a straight line over the level distance for the pure satisfaction of watching the horizon across illimitable space remain stationary and changeless, despite their puny efforts to stride the nearer to it. Sometimes, when they chose the level, they played, like children, that they would walk and walk till the low-lying horizon had to change, until out of its hazy enchantment rose mountain-peaks and forests and valleys and cities. It proved an alluring game. A great and abiding friendship grew out of this _wanderlust_, cemented by a loneliness that each girl carried closely in the innermost recesses of her heart and guarded jealously there. It was a like loneliness in the littleness and atom-like inconsequence of self each must hug to her breast,—and yet, how unlike! Louise was alone in a strange, big land, but there was home for her somewhere, and kin of her own kind to whom she might flee when the weight of alienism pressed too sorely. But Mary was alone in her own land; there was nowhere to flee to when her heart rebelled and cried out in the bitterness of its loneliness; this was her home, and she was alone in it.