But before long he grew accustomed to the strangeness of the situation, and constraint dropped from him. "Why, I reckon it's all natural," he confided to her. "Folks grow up, don't they? Take you. Yesterday you was a kid, an' I dawdled you on my knee. Today you're a woman, an' it makes me feel some breathless to look at you. But it's all natural. I'd been seein' you so much that I'd forgot that time was makin' a woman of you." She blushed, and he marveled over it. "She can't see, herself, how she's changed," he told himself. And while they talked he studied her, noting that her color was higher than he had ever seen it, that the frank expression of her eyes had somehow changed--there was a glow in them, deep, abiding, embarrassed. They drooped from his when he tried to hold her gaze. He had always admired the frank directness of them--that told of unconsciousness of sex, of unquestioning trust. Today, it seemed to him, there was subtle knowledge in them. He was puzzled and disappointed. And when, half an hour later, he took his leave, after telling her that he would come again, to see her "dad," he took her by the shoulders and forced her to look into his eyes. His own searched hers narrowly. It was as in the old days--in his eyes she was still a child. "I reckon I won't kiss you no more, Hagar," he said. "You ain't a kid no more, an' it wouldn't be square. Seventeen is an awful old age, ain't it?" And then he mounted and rode down the trail, still puzzled over the lurking, deep glow in her eyes. "I reckon I ain't no expert on women's eyes," he said as he rode. "But Hagar's--there's somethin' gone out of them." He could not have reached the break in the canyon leading to the plains above the river, when Willard Masten loped his horse toward the Catherson cabin from an opposite direction. Hagar was standing on the porch when he came, and her face flooded with color when she saw him. She stood, her eyes drooping with shy embarrassment as Masten dismounted and approached her. And then, as his arm went around her waist, familiarly, he whispered: "How is my little woman today?" She straightened and looked up at him, perplexity in her eyes. "Rex Randerson was just hyeh," she said. "I wanted to tell him about you wantin' me to marry you. But I thought of what you told me, an' I didn't. Do you sure reckon he'd kill you, if he knowed?" "He certainly would," declared Masten, earnestly. "No one--not even your father--must know that I come here to see you." "I reckon I won't tell. But Miss Ruth? Are you sure she don't care for you any more?" "Well," he lied glibly; "she has broken our engagement. But if she knew that I come here to see you she'd be jealous, you know. So it's better not to tell her. If you do tell her, I'll stop coming," he threatened. "It's hard to keep from tellin' folks how happy I am," she said. "Once, I was afraid Rex Randerson could see it in my eyes--when he took a-hold of my arms hyeh, an' looked at me."