Within the house the mother was coaxing little Jack to bed.

Jimmy and Conny, at the farther end of the porch, were planning an extensive campaign against coyotes, and investing the unearned profits of their proposed industry.
Kitty's thoughts were many miles away.

In that bright and stirring life--so far from the gloomy stillness of her home land, where she sat so alone--what gay pleasures held her friends?
Amid what brilliant scenes were they spending the evening, while she sat in her dark and silent world alone?
As her memory pictured the lights, the stirring movement, the music, the merry-voiced talk, the laughter, the gaiety, the excitement, the companionship of those whose lives were so full of interest, her heart rebelled at the dull emptiness of her days.

As she watched the evening dusk deepen into the darkness of the night, and the outlines of the familiar landscape fade and vanish in the thickening gloom, she felt the dreary monotony of the days and years that were to come, blotting out of her life all tone and color and forms of brightness and beauty.
Then she saw, slowly emerging from the shadows of the meadow below, a darker shadow--mysterious, formless--that seemed, as it approached, to shape itself out of the very darkness through which it came, until, still dim and indistinct, a horseman was opening the meadow gate.

Before the cowboy answered Jimmy's boyish "Hello!" Kitty knew that it was Phil.
The young woman's first impulse was to retreat to the safe seclusion of her own room.