For three years the seasons sped by, soft-footed and swift, and the third June-time came smiling up the Sage Brush Valley. Many changes had marked the passing of these seasons. Ranches had extended their cultivated acres; trees spread a wider shade; a newly settled addition had extended the boundaries of New Eden; and a new factory and a high-school building for vocational training marked the progress of the town. Budding youth had blossomed into manhood and womanhood and the cemetery had gathered in its toll. Three years, however, had marked little outward change in the young Eastern girl who stayed by her choice of the Sage Brush country for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. She had flung all of her young energy into the dull routine of teaching mathematics; romance had given place to reality; idleness and careless dependence to regulated effort and carefully computed expenditures; gay social interests to the companionship of lesser opportunities, but broader vision. However, these things came at a sacrifice. When the newness wore away from her work, Jerry's hours were not all easeful, happy ones. Slowly, with the passing of the days, she began to learn the hard lesson of overcoming, a lesson doubly hard for one whose life hitherto had been given no preparation for duty. Yet, as her days gathered surer purpose her dark-blue eyes were less often dreamy, her fair cheeks took on a richer bloom, while her crown of glorious hair lost no glint of its gold. Her gift of winning friends, the old imperious power to make herself the center of the universe, was in no wise disturbed by being a citizen and a school-teacher instead of an Eastern lady of leisure sojourning temporarily in the Sage Brush country. The young men of the valley tried eagerly to win a greater place than that of mere friendship with her, but she gave no serious consideration to any of them, least of all--so she persuaded herself--to the young ranchman whom she had met so early after her arrival in Kansas. Further, she had persuaded herself that the pretty rural romance she had woven about him and his Norwegian neighbor, Thelma Ekblad, must be a reality. Thelma had finished her university course and was making a success of farming and of caring for her crippled brother Paul and that roly-poly Belkap baby, now a white-haired, blue-eyed, red-lipped chunk of innocence, responsibility, and delight. Gossip, beginning at Stellar Bahrr's door, said that interest in her neighbor, the big ranchman down the river, was responsible for Thelma's staying on the Ekblad farm, now that she had her university degree, because she could make a career for herself as a botany specialist in any college in the West. Jerry knew that love for a crippled brother and the care of a worse than orphaned child of the woman that brother had loved were real factors in the life of this country girl, but her air castles must be built for somebody, and they