As she told him with sparkling eyes of her beautiful ride through the night, through the beautiful brooding night, her courage and her innocence seemed to him like a fair, beneficent miracle. But he made no comment upon her story. He only sat in the doorway, looking down the road where he had watched her approach a few weeks ago, and when she said, noting his abstraction, "A penny for your thoughts, papa!" he asked, in a purely conversational tone, "Elizabeth,"--she always loved to hear him say "Elizabeth,"--"Elizabeth, do you think it would make Nick very mad indeed if we were to go snacks?" "Mad as hops!" she cried. "Then let's do it!" Elizabeth beamed. "And Elizabeth, there's no place like Switzerland in summer. Let's pack up and go!" "Let us!" she answered, very softly, with only a little exultant tremor on the words. She never guessed all that she had won that day; she only knew that life stretched on before her, a long, sunny pathway, where she and her father might walk together in the daily and hourly good-comradeship that she loved. IV. AT THE KEITH RANCH. The dance was in full swing--a vehement, rhythmic, dead-in-earnest ranch dance. Eight couples on the floor tramped or tiptoed, as the case might be, but always in perfect time with the two unmelodious fiddles. The tune, if tune it might be called, went over and over and over again, with the monotonous persistency of a sawmill, dominating the rhythmic tread of the dancers, but not subduing the fancy of the caller-out. The caller-out for the moment was a curly-headed lad of twenty, with a shrewd, good-humored face. He stood in a slouching attitude, one shoulder much higher than the other, and as he gave forth, in a singsong voice, his emphatic rhymed directions, his fingers played idly with the red-silk lacings of his brown flannel shirt. To an imaginative looker-on those idly toying fingers had an indefinable air of being very much at home with the trigger of the six-shooter at the lad's belt. So, at least, it struck Lem Keith. "Swing him round for old Mother Flannigan! You've swung him so nice, now swing him again, again! On to the next, and swing that gent! Now straight back, and swing your own man again!" Tramp, tramp, tramp went the rhythmic feet; diddle-diddle-dee went the fiddles. There was not much talking among either dancers or sitters-out. Occasionally one of the babies in the adjoining bedroom waked and wailed, but on the whole they were well-behaved babies. There they lay on the bed, six in a row, while their mothers eagerly snatched their bit of pleasure at the cost of a night's sleep. Lemuel Keith, joint host with his brother on this occasion, sat on a bench against the wall, contemplating with wonder the energy of these overworked women. Beside him sat the husband of one of them, a tall, gaunt ranchman, with his legs crossed, poising upon a bony knee an atom of humanity in a short plaided woollen frock.