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He smoked and looked at his watch frequently. The stars came out and the moon rose full. The fire burned down and the water cooled in the kettle. Whatever was detaining her? Impatient at first, Disston finally grew worried. He ate a little cold food that he found, and started to walk back to her.
"How very extraordinary!" Miss Rathburn observed languidly. "Plucky, I call it," Disston answered. "They've named her the 'Sheep Queen of Bitter Crick." Toomey laughed disagreeably. "It's curious you've never mentioned her, Hughie, when you've told us about everyone else in the country." "I didn't think you'd be interested, Beth," he answered stiffly.
It always made her think of Disston, of the light in his eyes when he had looked at her, of the feeling of his arms about her, of his lips on hers when he had kissed her. At such times it filled her with a longing for him which was a kind of sweet torture that unnerved her and made the goal for which she strove of infinitesimal importance.
It seemed minutes that she stood there, though it was only one at most. In spite of his worldly air and social ease, Disston was only a boy after all, with a boy's keen sensitiveness to ridicule, and this ordeal was something outside the experience of his nineteen years.
For an instant Disston looked at her with an expression which was at once angry and startled, but before he had framed an answer Teeters appeared in the doorway behind them and said soberly: "Looks like somethin' serious is startin' over yonder." He nodded toward the mountains. "What do you mean?" Disston asked quickly.
"I haven't any other wish, and, right or wrong, I'll do anything you say, but I'm as shore as we're settin' here that you'll never find it with me. I thought I hoped that Disston feller " She interrupted sharply: "Don't, Bowers, don't!" Understanding grew in his troubled eyes as he looked at her quivering chin and mouth. "So that was it!" he reflected.
To Disston, who remembered her faculty for finding something interesting or amusing in everything about which to chatter, the difference was noticeable. It saddened him, the change in her, yet he was conscious that she still retained her strong attraction for him.
If Disston had known, he might have swayed her then, but, since he could not, he only said with an effort: "If your love for me isn't big enough to make you abandon this purpose, I shan't urge you. I know it would be useless. You have a strange nature, Kate a mixture of steel and velvet, of wormwood and honey."
Her clothes could not hide the long beautiful curves of her tall figure and she carried herself very erect, with something dignified and authoritative in her manner, while her wide free gestures were the movements of independence and self-reliance. Disston looking at her eagerly and intently as she came closer noted that the changes the years had made were chiefly in her expression.
"Come here and help me earmark the rest of these yearlings." Disston stood for a moment, feeling himself dismissed and already forgotten, yet conscious with a rush of emotion which startled him, that in spite of the fact that her dress, speech, manner, occupation, mode of life violated every ideal and tradition, she appealed to him powerfully, stirred him as had no other woman.
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