"You and your wife are leaving soon?" she asked him, and, when he nodded, she gave a sigh. "I'll be missing you," she said, throwing away her _brusquerie_ like a rag with which she was done. "You've been company for me. You've made use of lots of patience and courage, but I have really liked it. I've not got the ways of being sociable and I don't know that I want ever to get them. I am not seeking for friends. There isn't another person on the ranch that would dare talk to me as you and Mrs. Morena have talked. They don't know anything about me here and I don't mean that they should know." She paused, then gave way to an impulse of confidence. "One of the boys asked me to marry him. He came and shouted it through the window and I caught him with a pan of water." She sighed. "I don't know rightly if he meant it for a joke or not, but the laugh wasn't on me." Jasper controlled his laughter, then saw the dry humor of her eyes and lips and let out his mirth. "Why, sir," said Jane, "you'd be surprised at the foolishness of men. Sometimes it seems that, just for pure contrariness, they want to marry her that least wants them about. The day I came tramping into this valley, I stopped for food at the ranch of an old bachelor down yonder at the ford. And he invited me to be his wife while I was drinking a glass of water from his well. He told me how much money he had and said he'd start my stove for me winter mornings. There's a good husband! And he was sure kind to me even when I told him 'no.' 'T was that same evening that the boy from Lazy-Y rode in and claimed me for a cook. Mr. Yarnall is a trusting man. He took me and didn't ask any questions. I told him I was 'Jane' and that I wasn't planning to let him know more. He hasn't asked me another question since. He's a gentleman, I figure it, and he's kind of quiet himself about what he was before he came to this country. He's a man of fifty and he has lots back of him only he's taken a fresh start." She sighed, "Folks like you and Betty seem awfully open-hearted. It's living in cities, I suppose, where every one knows every one else so well." This astonishing picture of the candid simplicity of New York's social life absorbed Jasper's attention for some time. "Wouldn't you like to live in a city, Jane?" She laughed her short, boyish "Hoo!" "It isn't what I would like, Mr. Morena," she said. "Why, I'd like to see the world. I would like to be that fellow who was condemned to wander all over the earth and never to die. He was a Jew, too, wasn't he?" Jasper flushed. People were not in the habit of making direct reference to his nationality, and, being an Israelite who had early cut himself off with dislike from his own people and cultivated the society of Gentiles, "a man without a country," he was acutely sensitive. "The Wandering Jew? Yes. Where did you ever hear of him?" "I read his story," she answered absently; "an awful long one, but interesting, about lots of people, by Eugene Sue."