“No,” answered Eleanor.  “I’m not going to sell any of my father’s estate.”

And when Matthews withdrew to join the Williams at the missionary meeting, she burst into tears.

She went across to the window wondering about Wayland.  She had not seen him since early morning, before breakfast, when he called at the sitting room door to arrange their return up the Valley next day.  The Williams and Matthews would go up in the buckboard.  Would she ride back up the hog’s back trail with him?  He would hire horses and riding togs now if she would say?  Yes, he knew it would be steep up grade; but then, they could go it slow; he laughed as he said that.  You see the hog’s back trail was fifteen miles shorter than the Valley road and they could afford to go it slow; in fact, very slow.

“Come on in,” urged Eleanor, throwing open the parlor door.  “The Williams are not up, yet!”

“That’s why I came!  No, I’ll not come in:  not much!  I’m keeping resolutions!”

She had not understood the wistfulness beneath his forced gayety until Matthews told her all that afternoon.

“It will be our last ride:  you’ll come, won’t you?” asked Wayland.

She had promised.  Then, she had spent a most miserable morning.  Why was it to be the last ride?  She had not cared to go out.  Though the papers had suppressed all details of the cowardly assassination, the glare of publicity had been focussed too keenly on her for comfort by that explosion of the old frontiersman in the court room.  She had remained in all morning watching the motley crowds of a frontier town surge past the hotel windows down the dusty hot main street, with its medley of fine brick blocks, and poor shacks, and saloons, and false fronts—­little unpainted restaurants and cigar stands and gambling places of one-story, with a false timber wall running up a couple of stories.

“United States of the World,” the old frontiersman had called this country.  Surely that was the true name of the wonderful new country that had defied all traditions and mingled in her making the races from every corner of the world!  An immigrant train had come in.  Eleanor lifted the parlor window, and looked, and listened.  Jap and Chinese and Hindoo—­strikingly tall fellows with turbaned head gear; negro and West Indians and Malay; German and Russian and Poles and Assyrians.  In half an hour, she did not hear one word of pure English, or what could be called American.  Oh, it was good to be alive in this wonderful new world under these wonderful new conditions working out the age-old problem of right and wrong that had defied solution since time began!  She did not mind the crudity.  And if I am to be frank, she did not mind the rudity.  It was not a boiled shirt-front, kid-glove world.  In fact, at that moment she saw her hero stage driver shooting out tobacco squids at the innocent granolithic, which showed no target