"I beg your pardon, Myra. Really, I didn't know it had anything to do with gambling. But to go back to our manners: I'll give you the ponies and the phaeton if I don't convince you that the absent-minded gentleman on our left here is the tenderest of tenderfoots--most probably from Philadelphia, too," she added, in mischievous afterthought. "You wouldn't dare!" "You think not? Just wait and you'll see. Oh, cousin mine, you've a lot to learn about your kind, yet. If you stay out here six months or a year, you will begin to think your philosophy hasn't been half dreamful enough." "How absurd you are, Constance. If I didn't know you to be"-- "Wait a minute; let me start you off right: good, and sensible, and modest, and unassuming, and dutiful, and brimful of fads"--she checked the attributes off on her fingers. "You see I have them all by heart." The little cloud of dust puffing from beneath the drop-curtain began to subside, and the thumping and rumbling on the stage died away what time the musicians were clambering back to their places in the orchestra. Miss Van Vetter swept the aisles and the standing-room with her opera-glass. "You will not have a chance to prove it, Connie. He isn't coming back." "Don't you believe it. I am quite sure he is a gentleman who always gets the worth of his money." "What makes you say that?" "Oh, I don't know; intuition, I suppose. That's what they call it in a woman, though I think it would be called good judgment in a man." Taking him at his worst, Miss Elliott's terse characterization of Henry Jeffard was not altogether inaccurate, though, in the present instance, he would not have gone back to the theatre if he had known what else to do with himself. Indeed, he was minded not to go back, but a turn in the open air made him think better of it, and he strolled in as the curtain was rising. Whereupon the elderly man and the two young women had to stand again while he edged past them to his chair. This time he remembered, and said something about being sorry to trouble them. Miss Elliott's chair was next to his, and she smiled and nodded reassuringly. Jeffard was moody and disheartened, and the nod and the smile went near to the better part of him. He kept his seat during the next intermission, and ventured a civil commonplace about the opera. The young woman replied in kind, and the wheel thus set in motion soon rolled away from the beaten track of trivialities into a path leading straight to the fulfillment of Miss Elliott's promise to her cousin. "Then you haven't been long in Denver," she hazarded on the strength of a remark which betrayed his unfamiliarity with Colorado. "Only a few weeks." "And you like it? Every one does, you know." Jeffard tried to look decorously acquiescent and made a failure of it. "I suppose I ought to be polite and say yes; but for once in a way, I'm going to be sincere and say no."