“I don't want any breakfast,” said Val, getting up and going over to the window--it would seem to avoid his caress. “The odor of that dining room is enough to make one fast forever.” She lifted the grimy lace curtain with her finger tips and looked disconsolately out upon the street. “It's just a dirty, squalid little hamlet. I don't suppose the streets have been cleaned or the garbage removed from the back yards since the place was first--founded.” She laughed shortly at the idea of “founding” a wretched village like that, but she had no other word at hand. “_Arline_,” she remarked, in a tone of drawling recklessness. “Arline swears. Did you know it? I suppose, of course, you do. She said something that struck me as being shockingly true. She said I'm 'sure having a hell of a honeymoon.'” Then she bit her lips hard, because her eyelids were stinging with the tears she refused to shed in his presence. “Oh, Val!” From the sofa Manley stared contritely at her back. She must feel terrible, he thought, to bring herself to repeat that sentence--Val, so icily pure in her thoughts and her speech. Val was blinking her tawny eyes--like the eyes of a lion in color--at the street. Not for the world would she let him see that she wanted to cry! A figure, blurred to indistinctness, appealed in a doorway nearly opposite, stood for a moment looking up at the reddened sky, and came across the street. As the tears were beaten back she saw and recognized him, with a curl of the lip. “Here comes your cowboy friend--from a saloon, of course.” Her voice was lazily contemptuous. “Only his presence in the street was needed to complete the picture of desolation. He has been in a fight, judging from his face. It is all bruised and skinned, and one eye is swollen--ugh! My guide, my adviser--is it possible, Manley, that you couldn't find a _nice_ man to meet me at the train?” She turned from the disagreeable sight of Kent and faced her husband. “Are all the men like that? And are all the women like--Arline?” Manley looked at her dumbly from the sofa. Would Val ever come to understand the place, and the people, he was wondering. She laughed suddenly. “I'm beginning to feel very sorry for Walt,” she said irrelevantly, pointing to the easel and the expressionless crayon portrait staring out from the gilt frame. “He has to stay in this room always. And I believe another two hours would drive me hopelessly insane.” The word caught her attention. “Hope!” she laughed ironically. “What imbecile ever thought of hope in the same breath with this place? What they really ought to do is paint that 'Abandon-hope' admonition across the whole front of the depot!” Manley, because he had lifted his head too suddenly and so sent white-hot irons of pain clashing through his brain, turned sullen. “If you hate it as bad as all that,” he said, “why, there'll be a train for the East in about two hours.”