Gregory stood for some time longer, leaning on the gate and waiting for the red fire to rise above the crystal mountains. He was eager for the morrow, not only because he longed to be at the foundation stones of his real life but because his mind craved the precise training, the logical development, the intoxicating sense of expansion which he had missed and craved incessantly during the six years that had elapsed since he had been torn from the School of Mines. Moreover, his heart was light; at last he was able to shift the great responsibilities of his ranch to other shoulders. Some six months since, his friend, Mark Blake, had recommended to him a young man who not only had graduated at the head of his class in the State College of Agriculture, but had served for two years on one of the State Experimental Farms. “What he don’t know about scientific farming, dry, intensive, and all the rest, isn’t worth shucks, old man,” Blake had written. “He’s as honest as they come, and hasn’t a red to do the trick himself, but wants to go on a ranch as foreman, and farm wherever there’s soil of a reasonable depth. Of course he wants a share of the profits, but he’s worth it to you, for the Lord never cut you out for a rancher or farmer, well as you have done. What you want is to finish your course and take your degree. Try Oakley out for six months. There’ll be only one result. You’re a free man.” The contract had been signed the day before. But Oakley had been a welcome guest in the small household for more than practical reasons. Until the night of his advent, when the two men sat talking until daylight, Gregory had not realised the mental isolation of his married life. Like all young men he had idealised the girl who made the first assault on his preferential passion; but his brain was too shrewd, keen, practical, in spite of its imaginative area, to harbor illusions beyond the brief period of novelty. It had taken him but a few weeks to discover that although his wife had every charm of youth and sex, and was by no means a fool, their minds moved on different planes, far apart. He had dreamed of the complete understanding, the instinctive response, the identity of tastes, in short of companionship, of the final routing of a sense of hopeless isolation he had never lost consciousness of save when immersed in study. Ida subscribed for several of the “cheapest” of the cheap magazines, and, when her Mongolians were indulgent, rocked herself in the sitting-room, devouring the factory sweets and crude mental drugs with much the same spirit that revelled above bargain counters no matter what the wares. She “lived” for the serials, and attempted to discuss the “characters” with her husband and John Oakley. But the foreman was politely intolerant of cheap fiction, Gregory open in his disgust.