Mariquita did not want to be indoors; outside, here on the tilted prairie, she was alone and not lonely. The tilt of the vast space around her showed chiefly in this--that eastward the horizon was visibly lower than at the western rim of the prairie. The prairie was not really flat; between her and both horizons there lay undulations, those between her and the western rising into _mesas_, which, with a haze so light as only to tell in the great distance, hid the distant barrier of the Rocky Mountains, whose foothills even were beyond the frontiers of this State. She knew well where they were, though, and knew almost exactly beyond which point of the far horizon lay Loretto Heights, beyond Denver, and the Convent. Somehow the coming of these two new units to the range-life had pushed the Convent farther away still. But Mariquita's thoughts never rested in the mere memories hanging like a slowly fading arras around that long-concluded convent life. What it had given her was more than the memories and was hers still. As to the mere memories, she knew that with slow but increasing pace they were receding from her, till on time's horizon they would end in a haze, golden but vague and formless. Voices once clearly recalled were losing tone; faces, whose features had once risen before the eye of memory with little less distinctness than that with which she had seen them when physically present, arose now blurred like faces passing a fog. Even their individuality, depending less on feature than expression, was no longer easily recoverable. She had been used to remember this and that nun by her very footsteps; now the nuns moved, a mere group in one costume, soundlessly, with no footstep at all. Of this gradual loss of what had been almost her only private possession she made no inward wishful complaint; Mariquita was not morbid, nor melancholy. The operation of a natural law of life could not fill her with the poet's rebellious outcry. To all law indeed she yielded without protest, whether it implied submission without inward revolt to the mere shackles of circumstance, or submission to her father's dominance; for it was not in her fashion of mind to form hypothesis--such hypothesis, for instance, as that of her father calling upon her to take some course opposed to conscience. Though her gaze was turned towards the point of the horizon under which the Convent and its intimates were, it was not simply to dream of them that she yielded herself.