What’s the use? As you say, I’ve started wrong with them, and I don’t see any prospect of getting right; and, besides, I like the rangers better. Landon thinks I might work into the service. I wonder if I could? It would give me something to do.”

She considered a moment. “We’ll think about that. Come into the kitchen. I’m cook to-day, mother’s gone to town.”

The kitchen was clean and ample, and the delicious odor of new-made bread filled it with cheer. As the girl resumed her apron, Wayland settled into a chair with a sigh of content. “I like this,” he said aloud. “There’s nothing cowgirl about you now, you’re the Anglo-Saxon housewife. You might be a Michigan or Connecticut girl at this moment.”

Her cheeks were ruddy with the heat, and her eyes intent on her work; but she caught enough of his meaning to be pleased with it. “Oh, I have to take a hand at the pots and pans now and then. I can’t give all my time to the service; but I’d like to.”

He boldly announced his errand. “I wish you’d take me to board? I’m sure your cooking would build up my shattered system a good deal quicker than your aunt’s.”

She laughed, but shook her head. “You ought to be on the hills riding hard every day. What you need is the high country and the air of the pines.”

“I’m not feeling any lack of scenery or pine-tree air,” he retorted. “I’m perfectly satisfied right here. Civilized bread and the sight of you will do me more good than boiled beans and camp bread. I hate to say it, but the Meeker menu runs largely to beef. Moreover, just seeing you would help my recovery.”

She became self-conscious at this, and he hastened to add:

“Not that I’m really sick. Mrs. Meeker, like yourself, persists in treating me as if I were. I’m feeling fine—perfectly well, only I’m not as rugged as I want to be.”

She had read that victims of the white plague always talk in this cheerful way about themselves, and she worked on without replying, and this gave him an excellent opportunity to study her closely. She was taller than most women and lithely powerful. There was nothing delicate about her—nothing spirituelle—on the contrary, she was markedly full-veined, cheerful and humorous, and yet she had responded several times to an allusive phrase with surprising quickness. She did so now as he remarked: “Somebody, I think it was Lowell, has said ‘Nature is all very well for a vacation, but a poor substitute for the society of good men and women.’ It’s beautiful up at the mill, but I want some one to enjoy it with, and there is no one to turn to, except Landon, and he’s rather sad and self-absorbed—you know why. If I were here—in the valley—you and I could ride together now and then, and you could show me all the trails. Why not let me come here and board? I’m going to ask your mother, if I may not do so?”

Quite naturally he grew more and more personal. He told her of his father, the busy director of a lumber company, and of his mother, sickly and inert.

“She ought never to have married,” he said, with darkened brow. “Not one of her children has even a decent constitution. I’m the most robust of them all, and I must seem a pretty poor lot to you.