"Yes, he's well; he's got steady work on some road up the mountain. He writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him 'old Mosey.' They're keeping bach together. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says they tasted like castor oil." As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair. "Rob wants me to come out there and be married," pursued the girl, bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy. "Why, Ethel!" Mrs. Weaver's voice was full of astonished disapproval. "I should think you'd be ashamed to say such a thing." "I didn't say it; Rob said it," returned the girl, making a little grimace at herself in the glass. "Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a girl. If a girl's worth having, she's worth coming after." Mrs. Weaver made this latter announcement with an air of triumph in its triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of contempt. "Well, if a fellow's worth having, isn't he worth going to?" she asked with would-be flippancy. "Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!" Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter's name slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense of her worth. "I never did hear the like." The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her mother. "It'll cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to California, and a hundred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up. Besides, he'll lose his job. I'd just as soon go out there as have him come here. If people don't like it they--they needn't." The girl's fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in restless search of diversion from impending tears. "Well, girls do act awful strange these days." Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter's tone and divided her disapproval by multiplying its denominator. "Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense," retorted Ethel huskily. "Well, I don't know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man, even if you're engaged to him; do you, mother?" Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law's appeal. "Well, it does seem a long way to go on--on an uncertainty, Ethel," she faltered. The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother. "Well, I hope you don't mean to call Rob an uncertainty?" she demanded angrily. "Oh, no; I don't mean that," pleaded the old woman. "I haven't got anything agen' Rob. I don't suppose he's any more uncertain than--than the rest of them. I"--