My Dinkie’s secret is no longer a secret. It divulged itself to me to-day with the suddenness of a thunder-clap. Peter Ketley has been back at Alabama Ranch for nearly three weeks.

I was out with the kiddies this afternoon, having another wild time on the toboggan-slide, dressed in an old Mackinaw of Dinky-Dunk’s buckled in close around my waist and a pair of Whinnie’s heaviest woolen socks over my moccasins and a mangy old gray-squirrel cap on by head. The children looked like cherubs who’d been rolled in a flour-barrel, with their eyes shining and their cheeks glowing like Richmond roses, but I must have looked like something that had been put out to frighten the coyotes away. At any rate, there we were, all squealing like pigs and all powdered from tip to toe with the dry snow and all looking like Piutes on the war-path. And who should walk calmly about the corner of the buildings but Peter himself!

My heart stopped beating and I had to lean 268 against the end of the toboggan-slide until I could catch my breath.

He called out, “Hello, youngsters!” as quietly as though he had seen us all the day before. I said “Peter!” in a strangled sort of whisper, and wondered what made my knees wabble as I stood staring at him as though he had been a ghost.

But Peter was no ghost. He was there before me, in the body, still smoking his foolish little pipe, wearing the familiar old coonskin cap and coat that looked as though the moths had made many a Roman holiday of their generously deforested pelt. He took the pipe out of his mouth as he stepped over to me, and pulled off his heavy old gauntlet before he shook hands.

“Peter!” I repeated in my ridiculous small whisper.

He didn’t speak. But he smiled, a bit wistfully, as he stared down at me. And for just a moment, I think, an odd look of longing came into his searching honest eyes which studied my face as though he were counting every freckle and line and eyelash there. He continued to X-ray me with that hungry stare of his until I took my hand away and could feel the blood surging back to my face.

“It’s a long time,” he said as he puffed hard on his pipe, apparently to keep it from going out. The 269 sound of his voice sent a little thrill through my body. I felt as rattle-headed as a rabbit, and was glad when Dinkie and Poppsy captured him by each knee and hung on like catamounts.

“Where did you come from?” I finally asked, trying in vain to be as collected as Peter himself.

Then he told me. He told me as nonchalantly as though he were giving me a piece of news of no particular interest. He had rather a difficult book to finish up, and he concluded the quietness of Alabama Ranch would suit him to a T. And when spring came he wanted to have a look about for a nest of the whooping crane. It has been rather a rarity, for some sixteen or seventeen years, this whooping crane, and the American Museum was offering a mighty handsome prize for a specimen. Then he was compelled to give his attention to Dinkie and Poppsy, and tried the slide a couple of times, and announced that our coaster was better than the chariot of Icarius. And by this time I had recovered my wits and my composure and got some of the snow off my Mackinaw.

“Have I changed?” I asked Peter as he turned to study my face for the second time.

“To me,” he said as he brushed the snow from his gauntlets, “you are always adorable!” 270

“Verboten!” I retorted to that, wondering why anything so foolish could have the power to make my pulses sing.

“Why?” he asked, as his eyes met mine.

“For the same old reason,” I told him.

“Reasons,” he said, “are like shoes: Time has the trick of wearing them out.”

“When that happens, we have to get new ones,” I reminded him.

“Then what is the new one?” he asked, with an unexpectedly solemn look on his face.

“My husband has just asked me to join him in Calgary,” I said, releasing my bolt.

“Are you going to?” he asked, with his face a mask.

“I think I am,” I told him. For I could see, now, how Peter’s return had simplified the situation by complicating it. Already he had made my course plainer to me. I could foresee what this new factor would imply. I could understand what Peter’s presence at Alabama Ranch would come to mean. And I had to shut my eyes to the prospect. I was still the same old single-track woman with a clear-cut duty laid out before her. There were certain luxuries, for the sake of my own soul’s peace, I could never afford.

“Why are you going back to your husband?” 271 Peter was asking, with real perplexity on his face.

“Because he needs me,” I said as I stood watching the children go racing down the slide.

“Why?” he asked, with what impressed me as his first touch of harshness.

“Must I explain?” I inquired with my own first movement in self-defense, for it had suddenly occurred to me that any such explaining would be much more difficult than I dreamed.

“Of course not,” said Peter, changing color a little. “It’s only that I’m so tremendously anxious to—to understand.”

“To understand what?” I questioned, both hoping and dreading that he would go on to the bitter end.

“That you understand,” was his cryptic retort. And for once in his life Peter disappointed me.

“I can’t afford to,” I said with an effort at lightness which seemed to hurt him more than it ought. Then I realized, as I stood looking up into his face, that I was doing little to merit that humble and magnificent loyalty of Peter’s. He would play fair to the end. He was too big of heart to think first of himself. It was me he was thinking of; it was me he wanted to see happy. But I had my own road to go, and no outsider could guide me. 272

“It’s no use, Peter,” I said as I put my mittened hand on his gauntleted arm without quite knowing I was doing it. And I went on to warn him that he must not confront me with kindness, that I was a good deal like an Indian’s dog which neither looks for kindness nor understands it. He laughed a trifle bitterly at that and reminded me, as he stood staring at me, of a Pribilof seal staring into an Arctic sun. Then he said an odd thing. “I wish I could make it a bit easier for you,” he remarked as impersonally as though he were meditating aloud.

I asked him why he said that. He evasively explained that he thought it was because I had what the Romans called constantia. So I asked him to explain constantia. And he said, with a shrug, that we might regard it as firm consideration of a question before acting on it. I explained, at that, that it wasn’t a matter of choice, but of character. He was willing to acknowledge that I was right. But before that altogether unsatisfactory little debate was over Peter made me promise him one thing. He has made me promise that before I leave we have a tramp over the prairie together. And we have agreed that Sunday would be as good a day as any.