"Do you want to learn?"
"I'd like to if I had a chance," he answered wistfully.
"All right. You have your chance. I'll see that Mr. Austin finds
something for you to do. From to-day you are in my employ."
She rode back to the ranch in the late afternoon, while the sun
was setting in a great splash of crimson. The round-up boss had
hinted that if she were nervous about riding alone he could find
it convenient to accompany her. But the girl wanted to be alone
with her own thoughts, and she had slipped away while he was busy
cutting out calves from the herd. It had been a wonderful relief
to her to find that HER Ned Bannister was the one that had
survived in the conflict, and her heart sang a paean of joy as
she rode into the golden glow of the westering sun. He was
alive--to love and be loved. The unlived years of her future
seemed to unroll before her as a vision. She glowed with a
resurgent happiness that was almost an ecstasy. The words of a
bit of verse she had once seen--a mere scrap from a magazine that
had stuck in an obscure corner of her memory--sang again and
again in her heart:
Life and love And a bright sky o'er us,
And--God take care Of the way before us!
Ah, the way before them, before her and her romance-radiating
hero! It might he rough and hilly, but if they trod it together--
Her tangled thoughts were off again in another glad leap of
imagination.
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