Thurston, in the next few days, owned to himself that there was no good reason for his tarrying longer in the big, un-peopled West, and that the proper thing for him to do was go back home to New York.
He had come to stay a month, and he had stayed five.

He could ride and rope like an old-timer, and he was well qualified to put up a stiff gun-fight had the necessity ever arisen--which it had not.
He had three hundred and seventy-one pictures of different phases of range life, not counting as many that were over-exposed or under-exposed or out of focus.

He had six unfinished stories, in each of which the heroine had big, blue-gray eyes and crimply hair, and the title and bare skeleton of a seventh, in which the same sort of eyes and hair would probably develop later.

He had proposed to Mona three times, and had been three times rebuffed--though not, it must be owned, with that tone of finality which precludes hope.
He was tanned a fine brown, which became him well.

His eyes had lost the dreamy, introspective look of the student and author, and had grown keen with the habit of studying objects at long range.