"Trustee--yes. Why," he cried, "it isn't possible that _you_ are the lady!" She laughed. "I suppose the lady must be I." He did not smile. He even lost color with wrath. "Garvey has dared to play you some trick!--I did not dream--" he went on, eagerly, "Garvey kept the letters in his hands, and bungled over the name, so I did not once fairly catch it." He turned back to his corner, and put the remaining bit of proof into his pocket. New heavens and new earth had come into existence since the last pencil mark on it. "Jim," he said, "I'm called off on school-business. You get as much of that set up as you can before dinner, and then lock up; and I'll come down and make the corrections in the editorials before I go to bed. Now--Winifred--if I may walk home with you, we'll get to the bottom of Garvey's tricks. Villain!" The epithet was so fervent, and so entirely without humorous intent, that Miss Northrop laughed again as they walked out into the dull, hot September afternoon sun. The board sidewalk was uneven and full of projecting nails and splinters, and she held her thin, blue-gray dress prettily aside from them; Will noted the gesture with admiration as intense as unreasonable. It seemed to him peculiarly admirable that she should draw her hat a little forward to shade her eyes, and should take just the length of step that she did; the absolutely right step for a lady was thenceforth settled; since then, he has insisted unreasonably upon a certain shade as the only right thing in gray, as if he held in his own mind some positive standard beyond the realm of variable taste. The two or three business blocks--rows of slight frame-buildings, more of them saloons than would seem possible--were very quiet; Green's Ferry is the shipping point of a wide stock-raising district, and all its activity centres about the railroad station at stated times daily. The justly aroused fellow-townsmen were all back under the awnings--leaning against the wall by the post-office, sitting on boxes by the grocery; some indolently telling stories and chaffing; some looking sleepily before them in absolute repose; some in various stages of inert drunkenness. All stared curiously at young Strong and the strange lady, and prepared to talk them over afterward, but no one addressed him. They turned aside soon into a broad cross street with no sidewalk, where the coarse dust was in places ankle deep. Behind them, beyond the main street, a few groups of yellowing cottonwoods on bare banks of reddish clay marked the course of the Sacramento; before them the street faded into a limitless expanse of gravel, thinly dotted in the distance with dull green oaks, and bounded by long knolls, like wrinkles in the plain, dark with oaks against the smoky sky of September--a sky dull blue above, dull gray near the horizon.