He felt a spasm of envy, however, as he thought of the letters Mark would receive from Ora. _Her_ letters, no doubt, would be worth reading, not only because she had a mind, and already had seen too much of Europe to comment on its obvious phases, but because they would be redolent of her subtle exquisite personality. He had once come upon a package of old letters among his mother’s possessions and read them. They had been written by his great-great-grandmother to her husband while he was a soldier in the War of the Revolution. It was merely the simple life of the family, the farm, and the woods, that she described, but Gregory never recalled those letters without feeling again the subtle psychological emanation of the writer’s sweet and feminine but determinate personality; it hovered like a wraith over the written words, imprisoned, imperishable, until the paper should fall to dust. So, he imagined, something of Ora’s essence would take wing on the rustling sheets of her letters. But the spasm of envy passed. Ora would write no such letters to Mark Blake. Her correspondence with her husband would be perfunctory, practical, brief. To some man she might write pages that would keep him up at night, reading and rereading, interpreting illusive phrases, searching for hidden and personal meanings, while two individualities met and melted.... But this yearning passed also. To receive such letters a man must answer them and that would be hell. He was on his way to change his clothes for overalls and get his blue dinner pail, well filled, from Custer. But before he reached the house he conceived an abrupt and violent distaste for life underground, an uncontrollable desire--or one which he made no effort to control--for long rides over the ranch, and a glimpse of Limestone Hill. It was seven months since he had seen his ranch save in snatches, and he wanted it now for months on end. He was not a town-bred man, and he suddenly hated the sight of Butte with her naked angles and feverish energies. He realised also that his mind insistently demanded a rest. To be sure he had intended to work in the mines for eight hours of the day, but he had planned to study for ten. Well, he would have none of it! Caprice was no characteristic of his, but he felt full of it this brilliant morning. If the air was so light in Butte that his feet seemed barely to touch the ground, so clear that the mountains seemed walking down the valley, what must it be in the country? He went rapidly to the house, left a message for Mark, packed a suit-case and took the next train for Pony. There he hired a horse and rode to his ranch.