But, however he strove to shut his eyes to it or his ears to it, the thing persisted and persisted.

The romance seemed complete up to that point.

There it broke, there it failed, there it became realism, grim, unlovely, unyielding.

To be true--and it was the first article of his creed to be unflinchingly true--he could not ignore it.

All the noble poetry of the ranch--the valley--seemed in his mind to be marred and disfigured by the presence of certain immovable facts.