her modest repression of the fact for the more than two weeks he had known her.
"They don't compare with this country, there's nothing in America to compare with it. This is the one place on this earth I've ever seen where there's room enough to live."
"Do you really like it that well?" he asked curiously, not altogether convinced. "I thought you were only waiting your time, I looked on you as a sort of trusty outside the prison walls, just waiting till your time was up. Do you mean you'd stay in this country by choice?"
"Nowhere else," she replied, pressing the words down so hard they seemed to cut a stencil in the recording plate of his mind.
Dr. Hall stopped, looking over the wide sweep of country that could be seen from the brow of Major Cottrell's hill. They had been walking by the side of the road over the knotty turf, the new grass lively with flowers white and blue, as strange to him as the examples of Mrs. Cottrell's early art. The river was a torrent of brown water to-day, tribute of mountain snows and wayside rains. It flashed among the tender green of cottonwood and willow, headlong in its haste to carry its waters safely through that land of harsh repute, without having them sucked down into the barley-brown sands of the bars.
Across the river several miles away, there was a heaving up of rugged hills, treeless, their backs patched with white outcroppings through the gray-green coat of grass like some earthy scabies, their nearer face white as chalk where erosion of dead ages had broken them down. Over there these hills filled in a boundary, making the world
