It is not worth while, however, to repeat all the nonsense Farnham uttered in the next hour. He got very much interested in it himself, and was so eager sometimes to be amusing that he grew earnest, and the gentle laugh would cease and the pretty lips would come gravely together. Whenever he saw this he would fall back upon his trifling again. He had the soldier's fault of point-blank compliment, but with it an open sincerity of manner which relieved his flattery of any offensiveness. He had practised it in several capitals with some success. A dozen times this evening, a neat compliment came to his lips and stopped there. He could hardly understand his own reserve before this laughing young lady. Why should he not say something pretty about her hair and eyes, about her graceful attitude, about the nimble play of her white fingers over the paper? He had uttered frank flatteries to peeresses without rebuke. But he held his hand before this school-girl, with the open dark-brown eyes and a club of yellow hair at the back of her neck. He could not help feeling that, if he talked to her with any forcing of the personal accent, she would stop laughing and the clear eyes would be troubled. He desired anything rather than that, and so the conversation went rattling on as free from personalities as the talk of two light-hearted and clever schoolboys. At one moment he was describing a bill of fare in a Colorado hotel. "With nice bread, though, one can always get on," she said. "True," Farnham answered; "but this bread was of a ghostly pallor and flatness, as if it had been baked by moonlight on a grave-stone." "The Indian women cook well, do they not?" she asked. "Some are not so bad as others. One young chief boasted to me of his wife's culinary accomplishments. He had been bragging all the morning about his own exploits, of the men he had killed and the horses he had stolen, and then to establish his standing clearly in my mind, he added: 'My squaw same white squaw--savey pie.'" "Even there, then, the trail of the pie-crust is over them all." "No! only over the aristocracy." "I should like so much to see that wonderful country." "It is worth seeing," he said, with a curious sinking of the heart, "if you are not under orders." He could not help thinking what a pleasant thing a journey through that Brobdingnaggian fairy-land would be with company like the young girl before him. Nature would be twice as lovely reflected from those brown eyes. The absurdities and annoyances of travel would be made delightful by that frank, clear laugh. The thought of his poor Nellie flitted by him an instant, too gentle and feeble for reproach. Another stronger thought had occupied his mind.