and most fashionable part of the town. For such distinctions are made
in Western towns as soon as the first two shanties are built. The Bines
house had been a monument to new wealth from the earliest days of the
town, which was a fairly decent antiquity for the region. But the house
and the town grated harshly now upon the young man. He burned with a
fever of haste to be off toward the East--over the far rim of hills,
and the farther higher mountain range, to a land that had warmed
genially under three hundred years of civilised occupancy--where people
had lived and fraternised long enough to create the atmosphere he
craved so ardently.

While Chinese Wung lighted the hall gas and busied himself with their
hats and bags, Psyche Bines came down the stairs to greet them. Never
had her youthful freshness so appealed to her brother. The black gown
she wore emphasised her blond beauty. As to give her the aspect of
mourning one might have tried as reasonably to hide the radiance of the
earth in springtime with that trifling pall.

Her brother kissed her with more than his usual warmth. Here was one to
feel what he felt, to sympathise warmly with all those new yearnings
that were to take him out of the crude West. She wanted, for his own
reasons, all that he wanted. She understood him; and she was his ally
against the aged and narrow man who would have held them to life in
that physical and social desert.

"Well, sis, here we are!" he began. "How fine you're looking! And how
is Mrs. Throckmorton? Give her my love and ask her if she can be ready
to start for the effete East in twenty minutes."

It was his habit to affect that he constantly forgot his mother's name.