While the two worked together at their homely task, the girl related in trivial detail the news of the neighborhood, and repeated faithfully the talk she had had with the mistress of the Cross-Triangle, answering all her mother’s questions, replying with careful interest to the older woman’s comments, relating all that was known or guessed, or observed regarding the stranger.  But of her meeting with Patches, Kitty said little; only that she had met him as she was coming home.  All during the evening meal, too, Patches was the principal topic of the conversation, though Mr. Reid, who had arrived home just in time for supper, said little.

When supper was over, and the evening work finished, Kitty sat on the porch in the twilight, looking away across the wide valley meadows, toward the light that shone where the walnut trees about the Cross-Triangle ranch house made a darker mass in the gathering gloom.  Her father had gone to call upon the Dean.  The men were at the bunk-house, from which their voices came low and indistinct.  Within the house the mother was coaxing little Jack to bed.  Jimmy and Conny, at the farther end of the porch, were planning an extensive campaign against coyotes, and investing the unearned profits of their proposed industry.

Kitty’s thoughts were many miles away.  In that bright and stirring life—­so far from the gloomy stillness of her home land, where she sat so alone—­what gay pleasures held her friends?  Amid what brilliant scenes were they spending the evening, while she sat in her dark and silent world alone?  As her memory pictured the lights, the stirring movement, the music, the merry-voiced talk, the laughter, the gaiety, the excitement, the companionship of those whose lives were so full of interest, her heart rebelled at the dull emptiness of her days.  As she watched the evening dusk deepen into the darkness of the night, and the outlines of the familiar landscape fade and vanish in the thickening gloom, she felt the dreary monotony of the days and years that were to come, blotting out of her life all tone and color and forms of brightness and beauty.

Then she saw, slowly emerging from the shadows of the meadow below, a darker shadow—­mysterious, formless—­that seemed, as it approached, to shape itself out of the very darkness through which it came, until, still dim and indistinct, a horseman was opening the meadow gate.  Before the cowboy answered Jimmy’s boyish “Hello!” Kitty knew that it was Phil.

The young woman’s first impulse was to retreat to the safe seclusion of her own room.  But, even as she arose to her feet, she knew how that would hurt the man who had always been so good to her; and so she went generously down the walk to meet him where he would dismount and leave his horse.

“Did you see father?” she asked, thinking as she spoke how little there was for them to talk about.

“Why, no.  What’s the matter?” he returned quickly, pausing as if ready to ride again at her word.