"Oh, the ornery pup will be back all right. Lazy fellers waitin' to marry rich old maids ain't worth follerin'. Darn 'em! Slick skeezicks, tryin' to git rich jes' doin' nothin'." So the two citizens agreed while they consigned a perfect stranger to a mild purgatory. His brisk wholesomeness offended them, and the narrowness of their own daily lives bred prejudice as the marshes breed mosquitoes. Dr. Carey walked away with springing step. He was glad to be at his journey's end; glad to be off the slow little train, and glad to see again the October woods of the Alleghany foothills. To the eastern-bred man, nothing in the grandeur of the prairie landscape can quite meet the craving for the autumn beauty of the eastern forests. The slanting rays of the late afternoon sun fell athwart the radiant foliage of the woods as Dr. Carey's way led him between the two lines of flaming glory. When he had cleared the creek valley, his pace slackened. Something of the old boyhood joy of living, something of the sorrowful-sweet memory, the tender grace of a day that is dead, but will never be forgotten, came with the pensive autumn mood of Nature to make the day sweet to the pensive mind. Jane Aydelot sat on the veranda of the Aydelot home, looking eagerly toward Cloverdale, when she discovered Dr. Carey coming leisurely up the road. She was nearly forty years old, as the railroad station loafers had declared, but there was nothing about her to indicate the "old maid, set in her ways." She might have passed for Asher's sister, for she had a certain erect bearing and strong resemblance of feature. All single women were called old maids at twenty-five in those days. Else this fair-faced woman, with clear gray eyes and pink cheeks, and scarce a hint of white in her abundant brown hair, would not have been considered in the then ridiculed class. There was a mixture of resoluteness and of timidity in the expression of her face betokening a character at once determined of will but shrinking in action. And withal, she was daintily neat and well kept, like her neat and well-kept farm and home. As Dr. Carey passed up the flower-bordered walk, she arose to greet him. If there was a look of glad expectancy in her eyes, the doctor did not notice it, for the whole setting of the scene was peacefully lovely, and the fresh-cheeked, white-handed woman was a joy to see. Some quick remembrance of the brown-handed claimholders' wives crossed his mind at that instant, and like a cruel stab to his memory came unbidden the picture of Virginia Thaine in her dainty girlishness in the old mansion house of the years now dead. Was he to blame that the contrast between Asher Aydelot's wife, now of Kansas, and Jane Aydelot of Ohio should throw the favor toward the latter, that he should forget for the moment what the women of the frontier must sacrifice in the winning of the wilderness? "I am glad to see you again, Doctor," Jane Aydelot said in cordial greeting.