“Oh, I don’t know,” replied Dick, with a bachelor’s vagueness on the question of a child’s age, “five—six—seven, may be. Ten years ago, you know.” “Just coming in to grass,” observed Mr. Winfield, meditatively. * * * * * Two months after the evening on which this conversation took place, Mr. Richard Cutter walked up one of the quietest and most eminently respectable of the streets of Tusculum. Mr. Cutter was nervous. He was, for the second time, making up his mind to attempt a difficult and delicate task. He had made up his mind to it, or had had it made up for him; but now he felt himself obliged to go over the whole process in his memory, in order to assure himself that the mind was really made up. The suggestion had come from Winfield. He remembered with what a dazed incomprehension he had heard his chum’s proposition to induce Mr. Bailey and all his family to migrate to Montana and settle at Starbuck. “We’ll give the old man all the surveying he wants. And he can have Ashford’s place on the big dam when Ashford goes East in August. Why, the finger of Providence is pointing Bailey straight for Starbuck.” [Illustration] With a clearer remembrance of Eastern conventionalities than Mr. Winfield, Dick Cutter had suggested various obstacles in the way of this apparently simple scheme. But Winfield would hear of no opposition, and he joined with him eight other young ranchmen, who entered into the idea with wild Western enthusiasm and an Arcadian simplicity that could see no chance of failure. These energetic youths subscribed a generous fund to defray the expenses of Mr. Cutter as a missionary to Tusculum; and Mr. Cutter had found himself committed to the venture before he knew it. Now, what had seemed quite feasible in Starbuck’s wilds wore a different face in prim and proper Tusculum. It dawned on Mr. Cutter that he was about to make a most radical and somewhat impudent proposition to a conservative old gentleman. The atmosphere of Tusculum weighed heavy on its spirits, which were light and careless enough in his adopted home in Montana. Therefore Mr. Cutter found his voice very uncertain as he introduced himself to the young lady who opened, at his ring, the front door of one of the most respectable houses in that respectable street of Tusculum. “Good morning,” he said, wondering which one of the Nine Cent–Girls he saw before him; and then, noting a few threads of gray in her hair, he ventured: “It’s Miss—Miss Euphrosyne, isn’t it? You don’t remember me—Mr. Cutter, Dick Cutter? Used to live on Ovid Street. Can I see your father?” “My father?” repeated Miss Euphrosyne, looking a little frightened. “Yes—I just want—“ [Illustration] “Why, Mr. Cutter—I do remember you now—didn’t you know that Papa died nine years ago—the year after you left Tusculum?”