With the eyes of love Aunt Susan saw that four years in a position of authority had ripened her darling, and made of her a woman of wit and judgment, who could tell a necessary thing in a right manner or with a reserve which was commendable. Eagerly she studied her to see what the changes of those formative years had brought her. She listened to Elizabeth's plans for going to Topeka, and rejoiced that the intellectual stimulus was still strong in her. Elizabeth was obliged to explain away her parent's attitude regarding further education, and left much for the older woman to fill in by her intuitions and experience of the world, but there again Susan Hornby saw evidences of strength which made her feel that the loss was offset by power gained. Elizabeth Farnshaw had matured and had qualities which would command recognition. John Hunter had shown that he recognized them--a thing which Elizabeth without egotism also knew. It was a new experience to go to sleep thinking of any man but Hugh. In the darkness of the little bedroom in which Elizabeth slept that night Hugh's priority was met face to face by John Hunter's proximity. Possession is said to be nine points in the law, and John Hunter was on the ground. The girl had been shut away from those of her kind until her hungry hands in that hour of thought, reached out to the living presence of the cultured man, and her hungry heart prayed to heaven that she might not be altogether unpleasing to him. In the hour spent with John Hunter she had learned that he had come to Kansas to open a farm on the only unmortgaged piece of property which his father had left him when he died; that his mother intended to come to him as soon as he had a house built; and by an accidental remark she had also learned that there were lots in some eastern town upon which enough money could be raised to stock the farm with calves and that it was the young man's intention to farm this land himself. It seemed so incredible that John Hunter should become a farmer that by her astonished exclamation over it she had left him self-satisfied at her estimate of his foreignness to the life he was driven to pursue. Elizabeth saw that if John Hunter must needs run a farm that he would do his best at it, but that he did not wish to _appear_ one with a role, and being young and with her own philosophy of life in a very much muddled condition, she liked him the better for it. Crucified daily by the incongruities of her own home, she craved deliverance from it and all it represented.