to the bringing and taking of messages.  She remained sole queen of the domain.  A rare straggler from the main road, penetrating this seclusion, might have scarcely distinguished her from Waya, in her coarse cotton gown and slouched hat, except for the free stride which contrasted with her companion’s waddle.  Once, in following an estrayed calf, she had crossed the highway and been saluted by a passing teamster in the digger dialect; yet the mistake left no sting in her memory.  And, like the digger, she shrank from that civilization which had only proved a hard taskmaster.

The sole touch of human interest she had in her surroundings was in the rare visits of the doctor and his brief but sincere commendation of her rude and rustic work.  It is possible that the strange, middle-aged, gray-haired, intellectual man, whose very language was at times mysterious and unintelligible to her, and whose suggestion of power awed her, might have touched some untried filial chord in her being.  Although she felt that, save for absolute freedom, she was little more to him than she had been to her father, yet he had never told her she had “no sense,” that she was “a hindrance,” and he had even praised her performance of her duties.  Eagerly as she looked for his coming, in his actual presence she felt a singular uneasiness of which she was not entirely ashamed, and if she was relieved at his departure, it none the less left her to a delightful memory of him, a warm sense of his approval, and a fierce ambition to be worthy of it, for which she would have sacrificed herself or the other miserable retainers about her, as a matter of course.  She had driven Waya and the other squaws far along the sparse tableland pasture in search of missing stock; she herself had lain out all night on the rocks beside an ailing heifer.  Yet, while satisfied to earn his praise for the performance of her duty, for some feminine reason she thought more frequently of a casual remark he had made on his last visit:  “You are stronger and more healthy in this air,” he had said, looking critically into her face.  “We have got that abominable alkali out of your system, and wholesome food will do the rest.”  She was not sure she had quite understood him, but she remembered that she had felt her face grow hot when he spoke,—­perhaps because she had not understood him.

His next visit was a day or two delayed, and in her anxiety she had ventured as far as the highway to earnestly watch for his coming.  From her hiding-place in the underwood she could see the team and Jim Hoskins already waiting for him.  Presently she saw him drive up to the trail in a carryall with a party of ladies and gentlemen.  He alighted, bade “Good-by” to the party, and the team turned to retrace its course.  But in that single moment she had been struck and bewildered by what seemed to her the dazzlingly beautiful apparel of the women, and their prettiness.  She felt a sudden consciousness of her own coarse, shapeless