It was not till mid-afternoon of the next day that Mott found time to join him and run over with him the details of such unfinished business as the office had taken up. The retiring manager was courtesy itself, nor did he feel any bitterness against his successor. Nevertheless, he came to the end of office hours with great relief. The day had been a very hard one, and it left him with a longing for solitude and the wide silent spaces of the open hills. He struck out in the direction which promised him the quickest opportunity to leave the town behind him. A good walker, he covered the miles rapidly, and under the physical satisfaction of the tramp the brain knots unraveled and smoothed themselves out. It was better so—better to live his own life than the one into which he was being ground by the inexorable facts of his environment. He was a young man and ambitious, but his hopes were not selfish. At bottom he was an idealist, though a practical one. He had had to shut his eyes to many things which he deplored, had been driven to compromises which he despised. Essentially clean-handed, the soul of him had begun to wither at the contact of that which he saw about him and was so large a part of. “I am not fit for it. That is the truth. Mott has no imagination, and property rights are the most sacred thing on earth to him. He will do better at it than I,” he told himself, as he walked forward bareheaded into the great sunset glow that filled the saddle between two purple hills in front of him. As he swung round a bend in the road a voice, clear and sweet, came to him through the light filtered air. “Laska!” A young woman on horseback was before him. Her pony stood across the road, and she looked up a trail which ran down into it. The lifted poise of the head brought out its fine lines and the distinction with which it was set upon the well-molded throat column. Apparently she was calling to some companion on the trail who had not yet emerged into view. At sound of his footsteps the rider’s head turned. “Good afternoon, Mr. Hobart,” she said quietly, as coolly as if her heart had not suddenly begun to beat strangely fast. “Good afternoon, Miss Balfour.” Each of them was acutely conscious of the barrier between them. Since the day when she had told him of her engagement they had not met, even casually, and this their first sight of each other was not without embarrassment. “We have been to Lone Pine Cone,” she said rather hurriedly, to bridge an impending silence. He met this obvious statement with another as brilliant. “I walked out from town. My horse is a little lame.” But there was something she wanted to say to him, and the time for saying it, before the arrival of her companion, was short. She would not waste it in commonplaces. “I don’t usually read the papers very closely, but this morning I read both the Herald and the Sun. Did you get my note?” “Your note? No.”