“I hope so, too,” she murmured.  To hear him talk frankly, seriously, like this counteracted the unfavorable impression she had received.  He seemed earnest.  He looked down at the ground, where he was pushing little pebbles with the toe of his boot.  She had a good opportunity to study his face, and availed herself of it.  He did look like his father, with his big, handsome head, and his blue eyes, bolder perhaps from their prominence than from any direct gaze or fire.  His face was pale, and shadowed by worry or discontent.  It seemed as though a repressed character showed there.  His mouth and chin were undisciplined.  Columbine could not imagine that she despised anything she saw in the features of this young man.  Yet there was something about him that held her aloof.  She had made up her mind to do her part unselfishly.  She would find the best in him, like him for it, be strong to endure and to help.  Yet she had no power to control her vague and strange perceptions.  Why was it that she could not feel in him what she liked in Jim Montana or Lem or Wilson Moore?

“This was my second long stay away from home,” said Belllounds.  “The first was when I went to school in Kansas City.  I liked that.  I was sorry when they turned me out—­sent me home....  But the last three years were hell.”

His face worked, and a shade of dark blood rippled over it.

“Did you work?” queried Columbine.

“Work!  It was worse than work....  Sure I worked,” he replied.

Columbine’s sharp glance sought his hands.  They looked as soft and unscarred as her own.  What kind of work had he done, if he told the truth?

“Well, if you work hard for dad, learn to handle the cowboys, and never take up those old bad habits—­”

“You mean drink and cards?  I swear I’d forgotten them for three years—­until yesterday.  I reckon I’ve the better of them.”

“Then you’ll make dad and me happy.  You’ll be happy, too.”

Columbine thrilled at the touch of fineness coming out in him.  There was good in him, whatever the mad, wild pranks of his boyhood.

“Dad wants us to marry,” he said, suddenly, with shyness and a strange, amused smile.  “Isn’t that funny?  You and me—­who used to fight like cat and dog!  Do you remember the time I pushed you into the old mud-hole?  And you lay in wait for me, behind the house, to hit me with a rotten cabbage?”

“Yes, I remember,” replied Columbine, dreamily.  “It seems so long ago.”

“And the time you ate my pie, and how I got even by tearing off your little dress, so you had to run home almost without a stitch on?”

“Guess I’ve forgotten that,” replied Columbine, with a blush.  “I must have been very little then.”

“You were a little devil....  Do you remember the fight I had with Moore—­about you?”

She did not answer, for she disliked the fleeting expression that crossed his face.  He remembered too well.