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“Um—well—it’s all in the past, honey. And Lee Marchbanks—Colonel Marchbanks, they call him, now—is a rich man, I hear, over in New Mexico. Jest leaving the kids with Mrs. Capadine while he brings out his second wife from the east somewheres. I expect they’ll have a fine lady for a mother when they go back.”

“Yes,” said Hilda, turning this information over slowly and curiously in her mind. “I didn’t know that.” She stole a look over her shoulder, through the open door, to where Miss Van Brunt, dressed exactly as she had been used to dress back in her New York home, sat reading a magazine. “Of course I have Aunt Valeria,” she remarked hesitantly.

Hank’s glance followed hers; he crinkled up his eyes in a look that was half smiling, half pitiful. Poor Miss Valeria always looked somehow like a person who had come to stay for only a day or two. The wind that whooped up over those great levels from the Gulf, and brought life and refreshment with it on the hottest summer noon, the wind that Hilda loved and made a playmate of, was to Miss Van Brunt a terrible bugbear—a sort of standing accusation against the whole west Texas country. When it blew three days on end, she went to bed with a nervous headache. When the domestic affairs of the household grew too puzzling, she went to bed with a headache, anyhow; one day Hilda heard Buster say to Missouri in the kitchen, “This here ranching proposition’s got the New York lady plumb buffaloed. Yet she’s sort of game, too—so game she won’t holler. I like to watch her not knowin’ what the mischief’s a-comin’ next, nor whichaway to turn, and pretendin’ she’s plumb wise to the rules.”