Val did not even watch him go. She stood still in the kitchen and looked at the table, and at the stove, and at the upturned frying pans. She watched two great horseflies buzzing against a window-pane, and when she could endure that no longer, she went into the front room and stared vacantly around at the bare walls. When she saw her picture again, nailed fast beside the kitchen door, her face lost a little of its frozen blankness--enough so that her lips quivered until she bit them into steadiness. She went then to the door and stood looking dully out into the parched yard, and at the wizened little pea vines clutching feebly at their white-twine trellis. Beyond stretched the bare hills with the wavering brown line running down the nearest one--the line that she knew was the trail from town. She was guilty of just one rebellious sentence before she struggled back to optimism. “I said I wanted it to be rough, but I didn't mean--why, this is just squalid!” She looked down the coulee and glimpsed the river flowing calmly past the mouth of it, a majestic blue belt fringed sparsely with green. It must be a mile away, but it relieved wonderfully the monotony of brown hills, and the vivid coloring brightened her eyes. She heard Manley enter the kitchen, set down the pail of water, and come on to where she stood. “I'd forgotten you said we could see the river from here,” she told him, smiling over her shoulder. “It's beautiful, isn't it? I don't suppose, though, there's a boat within millions of miles.” “Oh, there's a boat down there. It leaks, though. I just use it for ducks, close to shore. Admiring our view? Great, don't you think?” Val clasped her hands before her and let her gaze travel again over the sweep of rugged hills. “It's--wonderful. I thought I knew, but I see I didn't. I feel very small, Manley; does one ever grow up to it?” He seemed dimly to catch the note of utter desolation. “You'll get used to all that,” he assured her. “I thought I'd reached the jumping-off place, at first. But now--you couldn't dog me outa the country.” He was slipping into the vernacular, and Val noticed it, and wondered dully if she would ever do likewise. She had not yet admitted to herself that Manley was different. She had told herself many times that it would take weeks to wipe out the strangeness born of three years' separation. He was the same, of course; everything else was new and--different. That was all. He seemed intensely practical, and he seemed to feel that his love-making had all been done by letter, and that nothing now remained save the business of living. So, when he told her to rest, and that he would get dinner and show her how a bachelor kept house, she let him go with no reply save that vague, impersonal smile which Kent had encountered at the depot.