One morning Bella Jones, who ordinarily kept rather fashionable hours, came panting up the hill, the first to arrive. She was a dressy young person, whose father kept a "sample-room." Looking hastily about, to make sure that no one was there to have forestalled her, she cried, still quite out of breath: "Eliza Christie, she's lost her ma! Died in the night of a hemorag! Eliza ain't cried a drop, 'n her pa he's just settin' there like he was shot!" "Like he was shot!" Simon shivered at the words as if a cold wind had passed, striking a chill through the intense August day. The professor kept school that morning as usual, but he did not sit on the settle against the lean-to, and when Patsy Lenders undertook to hoist himself up on it, the boy got his ears boxed. Patsy stated afterwards, in maintenance of the justifiable pride of "ten years goin' on eleven," that he "wouldn't ha' took it from anybody but the perfessor," and he "wouldn't ha' took it from him, if 't hadn't a ben for that snake!" It was high noon. The sun was pouring down upon the group of children in the clearing in front of the lop-sided cabin, and upon the empty settle up against it; upon the brooding heights that spanned the horizon beyond the Gulch, upon the fragrant pine-trees close at hand. Simon Jr. had just strayed along with a blossoming yucca protruding from his mouth, and the professor had driven him farther up the slope. Returning from this short excursion, Simon beheld two figures coming up the Gulch; a blond-bearded man, and a little girl in blue. He hurried toward them in real trepidation. He could not bear to see the lamb actually in the company of the wolf. The three met on the edge of the clearing; Christie was the first to speak. "I've brought you Eliza," he said, in a steady, matter-of-fact voice, something like Eliza's own. "Her ma's dead, 'n you can have her 'f you want her. She thinks you'd like her." "What do you mean?" asked Simon, his voice clouding over, so that it was hardly audible. "Can I hev her for my own?" "Yes; that's the proposition! 'N there's a hundred dollars in her pocket which is all the capital I can raise to-day. I can do the funeral on tick. No; I won't try to get her away from you. She ain't my style." Simon was stooping down with his eyes on a level with Eliza's. "Say, Eliza," he asked, "would you like to be my little girl?" "Yes," quoth Eliza. "And come and live with me all the time?" "Yes!" and she put out a little hand and touched his face. "She won't be no great expense to you," said Christie. Simon stood up and cast a significant glance about him. "I guess if I let them prospectors in on my land," he said, "there won't be no great call for economizing!" The two men stood a moment facing each other with the same half-defiant, half-puzzled look they had exchanged at that other meeting, not so long ago. Christie was the first to break the silence.