color loyalty might paint. It was only a land of false promises, although it seemed fair as the heart could desire that bright October morning, its blue distances renewed by last night's rain, giving them a fresh allurement, a sad, on-drawing beauty of their own. No romance there, in spite of golden-rod at the roadside, and purple gentian and blue asters growing tall; or billowing sodland yet untouched by the plow stretching away until the eye faltered in its gray-green immensity.
It was all a deceitful lure, this girl thought bitterly, to draw men on to greater hazards and break them unmercifully as in the past. There was a lonely emptiness in the green grazing lands as the girl looked over them which made her heart drag with the hopeless lagging of defeat. Where the Ellison herds once had fed the pastures lay empty, the thousands of acres, once her father's baronial pride, only a tax burden now. For all the beauty of that land, once their hope of affluence and consequence, it was nothing but an impoverishing weight, ten sections of it in unbroken continuity, but only a small patch in the leagues-bounded range over which their sovereignty once fell.
If only she had been left in ignorance of any other life, she reflected, more sad than resentful, she might have taken the heartbreak of it with better grace. If she never had been sent away to graze in other pastures, and return almost an alien, in sympathy at least, the adjustment to this downfall would not have been so hard.
Poverty and ignorance consorted best together. It was a well-intended, but mistaken policy for people like her parents to educate their daughters on the hazards of the
