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To Hilda, sitting quietly there on the floor, the world was a great level plain, inhabited not so much by mankind as by cattle. The capital of this realm was Home—not merely the Three Sorrows ranchhouse as it had been in her father’s time, but the kind of home that Uncle Hank meant when he promised that dying father that the children should always have one. There are persons who spread around them this atmosphere of security against the jars and offenses of life, of safe comfort amid its loneliness or hostility; rich, selfless natures that dispel, as a flower its perfume, the sense of home. Hank, tall, bearded, deep-voiced, so much man in all his attributes, yet carried it with him. He served it at the tail of a chuck wagon or in the one-night cow camp. One could even imagine him bringing it into the cold and unhopeful air of a palace.

“Yes, we’ve got debts to pay and obligations to meet, and it’s goin’ to be close work for a spell,” he had said to Miss Valeria, when he talked matters over with the helpless, dismayed woman. “But there’s one thing sure, we’re a-goin’ to have a home for these children here in the meantime.”