He had visioned her standing at the great window that was set like the frame of a picture into the west end of the long drawing-room. The scene it framed each day was the sunset,--glorious sunsets such as only the desert may know. A great window of flawless plate glass, framing the far peaks that flamed each night anew. In the eastern wall the mate to that window was set cunningly so that it should frame a glory which Bill called dawn. Doris had never seen that picture, though Bill seldom missed it. But he had dreamed of her standing before the west window, looking upon the sunset. He had dreamed of other pictures of Doris in that house. Once or twice his heart had beat faster, believing that his dream was coming true. For Doris had been stimulated by the praise of her guests of the house-party. She had read in their faces a delight in this house set upon the edge of the wilderness. A few had asked if they might come back. So Doris was lingering in Parowan and playing great lady to the town,--and dramatizing herself to herself, with her California acquaintances for an imaginary audience. She had seen that they expected her to love the desert. Wherefore, she was professing to love the desert and the town, and to dread tearing herself away at the first frost. She meant to have her friends over again, she declared. She had thought of a perfectly original bit of fun for them. She would dress them all in miners' clothes and lead them right down into the mine, and let each one dig some gold for a souvenir. She wrote of this to Mrs. Baker Cole, who told her it was a wonderful idea. And now, here were the Parowan women gossiping about that wretched parrot. Doris did not need to hear what they were saying, in order to be sure that they were talking. She felt a difference in their attitude; thinly veiled resentment--and some sentiments which were not veiled at all. She would have left Parowan then, spurning it contemptuously as an impossible place to live in, but for one thing. Doris Hunter, born in the desert, knew desert ways and desert people. Though she would not admit it, she knew what would have been her own attitude, three or four years ago, toward a woman of wealth who lived in a mansion and patronized her friends. She knew that she would have resented the woman intensely, would have hated everything the woman said or did. And if the woman bungled her patronage and then left the place, Doris would have curled her lip and would have said that the woman left because she discovered that even in the desert people had their own ideas and refused to run after snobs. Knowing all that, Doris stayed, holding her head up proudly, as was her privilege. She had her house-party, and could be seen merrymaking on the broad porches, with colored lights and music and dancing, on cool nights after the days had been hot. Parowan was not invited to those frolics, but must view the colored lights and listen to the music from a distance.