At this point in his reflections Wakefield's elbows began to feel rough and gritty. He turned himself round and sat with his back to the mountains, looking eastward, his hands clasping one knee. He was glad the prairie was broken up into mounds and hillocks over there, and had not the look of the sea that it took on from some points of view. There was a group of pines off to the left; he had been too preoccupied to observe them as he came along the road,--strangely enough too, for a group of trees is an unusual sight out on the prairie. What a lot of trees there were in the East though, and how wofully he had come to grief among them up there on the North Shore! Only a year ago it had happened, only a year ago, in the fragrant New England June! His married sister had had Dorothy and himself visiting her at the same time. Well, Fanny had done her best for him, though it was no good. He wondered, in passing, how it happened that a fellow could come to care more for anybody else than for a sister like Fanny! He had found Dorothy sitting in perfect idleness under a big pine-tree that lovely June morning. There were robins hopping about the lawn; the voices of his sister's children came, shrill and sweet, calling to one another as they dug in the garden by the house. The tide was coming in; he could hear it break against the rocks over yonder, while the far stretches of sea glimmered softly in the sunshine. Dorothy looked so sweet and beneficent as she sat under the big pine-tree in the summer sunshine, that all his misgivings vanished. Before he knew what he was about he had "asked her." And here the little drama was blurred and muffled in his memory. He wondered, as he clasped his knees and studied the tops of the pine-trees, how he had put the question; whether he had perhaps put it wrong. He could not recall a word he had said; but her words in reply fell as distinct on his ear, as the note of the meadow-lark, down there by the roadside. How the note of the meadow-lark shot a thrill through the thin Colorado air,--informed with a soul the dazzling day! How cruelly sweet Dorothy's voice had been, as she said: "No, Harry, I couldn't!" It had made him so angry that he hardly knew how deep his hurt was. "You have no right to say no!" he had heard himself say. He could not remember whether that was immediately, or after an interval of discussion. She had stood up and turned away, not deigning to reply. And then the memory of that talk at the ball had struck him like a blow. "Wait, Dorothy! You must wait!" he had cried, aware that his imperative words clutched her like a detaining hand. Then, while his breath came fast, almost chokingly, he had said: "Tell me, Dorothy, is it because you don't call me _a man_ that you won't have me?" The angry challenge in his voice hardened her. "I don't know anything about how much of a man you are, Harry Wakefield," she had declared, with freezing indifference. "I only know you are not the man for me."