listener than when she talked to her husband.  As she now whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not predicable of her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering and drew it up to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out decorously over her person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of lamentation and conjecture.  “I do suppose he’ll be right back with her before I’m half ready; and what the man was thinkin’ of to do such a thing anyway, I don’t know.  I don’t know as she’ll notice much, comin’ out of such a lookin’ place as that, and I don’t know as I need to care if she did.  But if the’e’s care anywhe’s around, I presume I’m the one to have it.  I presume I did take a fancy to her, and I guess I shall be glad to see how I like her now; and if he’s only told her I want some sewin’ done, I can scrape up something to let her carry home with her.  It’s well I keep my things where I can put my hand on ’em at a time like this, and I don’t believe I shall sca’e the child, as it is.  I do hope Albe’t won’t hang round half the day before he brings her; I like to have a thing ova.”

Lander wandered about looking for the girl through the parlors and the piazzas, and then went to the office to ask what had become of her.

The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk.  “Oh, I guess she’s round in my wife’s room, Mr. Landa.  She always likes to see Clementina, and I guess they all do.  She’s a so’t o’ pet amongst ’em.”

“No hurry,” said Lander, “I guess my wife ain’t quite ready for her yet.”

“Well, she’ll be right out, in a minute or so,” said the landlord.

The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on the veranda and look at the landscape while he waited.  It was one of the loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of an abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of the valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped with folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops.  But Lander was tired of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put’ up with them, in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same resignation that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars and sleepers, and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables.  He was chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for its impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife’s disappointments from it.  He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an order of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though there were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of its justice.  He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was master in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he was in some sort of authority.  He perceived that now he was a slave to the wishes of a mistress who did not know