for he seemed able to read my thoughts.

“I was counting on two full sections for Allie in the Simmond’s Valley tract. That land is worth thirty dollars an acre, unbroken, at any time. But the bank’s swept that into the bag, of course, along with the rest. The whole thing was like a stack of nine-pins—when one tumbled, it knocked the other over. I thought I could manage to save that much for her, out of the ruin. But the bank saw the land-boom was petering out. They shut off my credit, and foreclosed on the city block—and that sent the whole card-house down.”

I had a great deal of thinking to do, during the next minute or two.

“Then isn’t it up to us to knuckle down, Dinky-Dunk, and make good on that Lady Alicia mistake? If we get a crop this year we can—”

But Dinky-Dunk shook his head. “A thousand bushels an acre couldn’t get me out of this mess,” he maintained.

“Why not?”

“Because your Lady Alicia and her English maid have already arrived in Montreal,” he quietly announced.

“How do you know that?”

“She wrote to me from New York. She’s had influenza, and it left her with a wheezy tube and a spot on her lungs, as she put it. Her doctor told her to go to Egypt, but she says Egypt’s impossible, just now, and if she doesn’t like our West she says she’ll amble on to Arizona, or try California for the winter.” He looked away, and smiled rather wanly. “She’s counting on the big game shooting we can give her!”

“Grizzly, and buffalo, and that sort of thing?”

“I suppose so!”

“And she’s on her way out here?”

“She’s on her way out here to inspect a ranch which doesn’t exist!”

I sat for a full minute gaping into Dinky-Dunk’s woebegone face. And still again I had considerable thinking to do.

“Then we’ll make it exist,” I finally announced. But Dinky-Dunk, staring gloomily off into space, wasn’t even interested. They had stunned the spirit out of him. He wasn’t himself. They’d put him where even a well-turned Scotch scone couldn’t appeal to him.

“Listen,” I solemnly admonished. “If this Cousin Allie of yours is coming out here for a ranch, she’s got to be presented with one.”

“It sounds easy!” he said, not without mockery.

“And apparently the only way we can see that she’s given her money’s worth is to hand Casa Grande over to her. Surely if she takes this, bag and baggage, she ought to be half-satisfied.”

Dinky-Dunk looked up at me as though I were assailing him with the ravings of a mad-woman. He knew how proud I had always been of that prairie home of ours.

“Casa Grande is yours—yours and the kiddies,” he reminded me. “You’ve at least got that, and God knows you’ll need it now, more than ever, God knows I’ve at least kept my hands off that!”

“But don’t you see it can’t be ours, it can’t be a home, when there’s a debt of honor between us and every acre of it.”

“You’re in no way involved in that debt,” cried out my lord and master, with a trace of the old battling light in his eyes.

“I’m so involved in it that I’m going to give up the glory of a two-story house with hardwood floors and a windmill and a laundry chute and a real bathroom, before that English cousin of yours can find out the difference between a spring-lamb and a jack-rabbit!” I resolutely informed him. “And I’m going to do it without a whimper. Do you know what we’re going to do, O lord and master? We’re going to take our kiddies and our chattels and our precious selves over to that Harris Ranch, and there we’re going to begin over again just as we did nearly four years ago!” Dinky-Dunk tried to stop me, but I warned him aside. “Don’t think I’m doing anything romantic. I’m doing something so practical that the more I think of it the more I see it’s the only thing possible.”

He sat looking at me as though he had forgotten what my features were like and was, just discovering that my nose, after all, hadn’t really been put on straight. Then the old battling light grew stronger than ever in his eyes.

“It’s not going to be the only thing possible,” he declared. “And I’m not going to make you pay for my mistakes. Not on your life! I could have swung the farm lands, all right, even though they did have me with my back to the wall, if only the city stuff hadn’t gone dead—so dead that to-day you couldn’t even give it away. I’m not an embezzler. Allie sent me out that money to take a chance with, and by taking a double chance I honestly thought I could get her double returns. As you say, it was a gambler’s chance. But the cards broke against me. The thing that hurts is that I’ve probably just about cleaned the girl out.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, wondering why I was finding it so hard to sympathize with that denuded and deluded English cousin.

“Because I know what’s happened to about all of the older families and estates over there,” retorted Dinky-Dunk. “The government has pretty well picked them clean.”

“Could I see your Cousin Allie’s letters?”

“What good would it do?” asked the dour man across the table from me. “The fat’s in the fire, and we’ve got to face the consequences.”

“And that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you, you foolish old calvanistic autocrat! We’ve got to face the consequences, and the only way to do it is to do it the way I’ve said.”

Dinky-Dunk’s face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it, that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I’d acted on impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing the right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even though at first sight it seemed too prodigious a sacrifice, just as I’d done the right thing when in the face of tribal reasoning and logic I’d gone kiting off to a prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It was a tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded, like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this newer change would mean to me and mine.

“You’re not going to face another three years of drudgery and shack-dirt,” declared Dinky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line of thought. “You went through that once, and once was enough. It’s not fair. It’s not reasonable. It’s not even thinkable. You weren’t made for that sort of thing, and—”

“Listen to me,” I broke in, doing my best to speak calmly and quietly. “Those three years were really the happiest three years of all my life. I love to remember them, for they mean so much more than all the others. There were a lot of the frills and fixin’s of life that we had to do without. But those three years brought us closer together, Dinky-Dunk, than we have ever been since we moved into this big house and got on bowing terms again with luxury. I don’t know whether you’ve given it much thought or not, husband o’ mine, but during the last year or two there’s been a change taking place in us. You’ve been worried and busy and forever on the wing, and there have been days when I’ve felt you were