"Why do you speak of them?" Alice begged. "Why not forget them, as I have tried to do?"

"I do try, dear, but the play to-night brought everything back to me.

How strange that we should happen on that particular one so soon after your father and I had spoken of those years! The 'Great Divide'--G.o.d only knows the human agony and truth those words contain!"

Eleanor controlled herself before she continued.

"It is a story which I have told only once before, and I had not thought to take any one except your father into its sad confidences; but you should know it, dear. My father's health broke down after mother died, and he was ordered West in the hope of prolonging his life. I was sixteen then, two years younger than you are now. We went to Colorado, on a ranch which father had bought upon the recommendation of a friend.

How well I remember the first impressions I received of that glorious country: the exhilaration of that wonderful air, the inspiration of those towering mountains, the novelty of the strange new conditions! I rejoiced in the largeness of everything, and it seemed to me, those first few days, as though life amid these surroundings could but reflect the richness with which nature itself overflowed."

Alice's eyes were fixed upon Eleanor's face with intense interest. The girl sensed even in these preliminary words the importance of what was to follow, and was unwilling to lose a single syllable. Eleanor caught the interest and sympathy of the girl's face as she paused for a moment, and it gave her strength.

"Were you quite alone there?" Alice asked.

"Practically alone--the nearest ranch was four miles from ours.

Naturally, we saw few people, the most constant visitor at this time being a young man who owned the ranch next to ours, who, during the year, had ridden over to see us with increasing frequency. His name was Ralph Buckner, and he seemed to us to be a characteristic product of the West--with his large frame, bluff manners, and frank, open countenance.

We all liked him, and the fact that he differed so much from the Eastern men I had known perhaps caused me to show a greater interest in him than I really felt. At all events, no girl was ever more genuinely surprised by an offer of marriage than I was, when it came unexpectedly one day, with that determination back of it to secure what he desired which was a part of the man himself. I did manage to collect my senses long enough to insist that I have time to think the matter over--for I had no idea of marrying him; but, much to my surprise, father approved the idea from the moment I told him of the proposal. Then it developed that Ralph had already approached him on the subject. Father, poor dear, thought only of my future and what he believed would be my happiness. It was so evident that I held in my hands the solution of his most serious problem that he never knew the misgivings I felt from the first. He could live on at the ranch for the present, busying himself with the work which kept him out-of-doors; then later, if he preferred, he could come and live with us."

"Couldn't he see what a sacrifice it meant to you?" Alice asked.

"No, dear; you must remember that, in his way, Ralph was an attractive fellow. He had been successful with his ranch; he was agreeable and intelligent; his Western boldness, as it seemed to me, was at times tempered with a certain gentleness hardly to be expected in a man of his nature; and, all in all, he was a man to whom any girl could at least give respect, and affection might come later. It meant settling down in the West for the rest of my life, but this was inevitable, anyway. I must forget the old friends and the old a.s.sociations, and could I not do this better with a husband's help than alone? I asked myself a thousand questions and ended by deciding that I would marry him.

"It was a short courtship--delay was a word not found in Ralph Buckner's vocabulary. We were married and began our life at his ranch, which, as I say, was near enough to my father so that we could be in frequent communication. He had been much concerned about me, having discovered more of my homesickness for the East than I had realized, so to see me well settled and apparently happy relieved him of a heavy load."

"But you weren't happy even at first," Alice insisted. "How could you be?"

"I say 'apparently happy,' dear, for that was all it was. Ralph did what he could for me in his own way, so at first it was perhaps my fault that we were not more congenial; but his ways were not my ways, and I kept looking for what was not there. He was well-born, but his life on the ranch for so many years had dulled his appreciation of those finer, innate qualities which every wife craves--he had forgotten how to be the gentleman. Don't think that I expected the impossible, or anything incongruous to the life we were leading; but there are little attentions, thoughtful considerations and other things in a husband's relation to his wife, trivial perhaps in themselves, which the wife expects and misses if she does not receive--the more so, if she has deluded herself into believing that the instincts for them are inborn, and only require her suggestion to develop and bring them to fruition.

These qualities he had seemed to show before we were married, but they proved to be only a veneer which soon wore off."

"Why do you bring this all back now ?" Alice asked, sympathetically, seeing the lines deepen in Eleanor's face.

"I must tell it to you, dear--we have grown so close that I feel this is all that remains between us. When you know this, we shall be sisters indeed."

"We are that already and more," Alice urged. "Only think how near of an age we really are."

"In years, yes; but sometimes I feel as if I had already lived centuries."

"Will the telling of this take a few of those centuries from you?" the girl inquired, smiling.

"I hope so; and that is one reason why I am asking you to share the burden with me. All that I have told you so far has been unimportant compared with what followed. Had it simply been a difference in temperament, I have no doubt that I should have become accustomed to the absence of these things I craved, and have adjusted my life to meet the new conditions. But other and more serious difficulties soon arose.

With Ralph Buckner possession seemed to be enough. I have seen him scheme for months to secure some high-bred horse or a fancy breed of cattle, and after they became his property hardly care whether he ever saw them again. So it was with his wife. Within six months he resumed his fortnightly visits to Colorado Springs on alleged business, from which he always returned worn out and ill-tempered. Until we were married, I had no idea that his life on the ranch and his life in Colorado Springs were so distinctly apart, but I was soon to learn it with bitter clearness."

As the story progressed Alice could feel the increasing tenseness.

Eleanor had herself well in hand, but the occasional break in her voice evidenced the strain.

"There was a so-called club in Colorado Springs whose members included the wildest young men of the town and several of the younger ranchmen who were able to stand the pace. In this Ralph was a leading spirit, drinking and gambling with that abandon which was his dominant characteristic. 'Buckner is a poor gambler but a good loser,' one of them is reported to have said, but that only meant that Ralph succeeded in concealing his real feelings until he reached home; for it was his wife who received the full force of the reaction as his brain cleared from the fumes of the liquor and he came to a realization of his losses."

She paused and looked at her companion, and encouraged by Alice's rapt attention continued:

"Our baby was born a year after we were married--"

"I never knew of that," the girl said, quietly.

"Don't," was the reply; "I can't go on if you weaken me by your sympathy."

"Forgive me, dear Eleanor," Alice murmured.

"By that time every remnant of a tie which held us together had disappeared. The child, however, was a real link, and for a little while gave us something to think of besides ourselves. For a year, perhaps, Ralph went less frequently to Colorado Springs, and I came to think that we might possibly be able to continue our lives together for the child's sake. But the novelty wore off from this new plaything, as it had from the others, though it lasted longer than anything else ever had, and then Ralph's absences from the ranch became more and more frequent and of longer duration. I cared little for this, as it enabled me to take Carina to my father's ranch, where I forgot for the time being the emptiness of the home to which we must sooner or later return."

Alice glanced up tenderly. "Poor dear Eleanor," she said, softly; but Mrs. Gorham went on without heeding:

"One day, when little Carina was three years old, we were visiting at my father's. It was late in the afternoon, and we were playing some child's game together when the door was suddenly thrown open and Ralph glowered in at us, his face purple with drunken anger. Even the four-mile ride had failed to sober him, and he leaned against the framework of the door to steady himself. The child, startled by the sudden interruption and terrified by the expression on her father's face, ran to me for protection, burying her little face in my lap.

"'That's right,' he leered at her; 'that's what they teach you to do here--make you hate your father, don't they? I'll give you a chance to get acquainted with me.'

"Then he crossed the room and tore the child from my arms, in spite of her shrieks of fear and our joint efforts to stop him. Even my father, who did all he could, was helpless against the man's almost superhuman strength. In a moment he had mounted his horse with Carina in front of him, and was galloping at breakneck speed down the long trail which led to our ranch. Father rushed to the barn, but I was there before him.

Between us we saddled the mare I had ridden so many times before I was married, and I urged her forward to make up as much as possible for the lost time. But I had not far to go--"

The recital proved too much for Eleanor, in spite of her efforts to control herself. Her eyes filled with tears, and her body was convulsed with emotion as she bent her head until it rested against her companion's face.

"Don't, dear," urged Alice; "tell me the rest some other time."

"No, no!" Mrs. Gorham cried; "you must know it all, and then we need not speak of it again. I had gone over less than half the distance when I came upon them both lying in the trail. I never knew how it happened. He told some one afterward that the horse stumbled. It may have been that; it may have been anything with him in that condition. He had fallen at the side of the trail and was conscious before I left him, but Carina was--dead."

"Don't, don't go on--I can't stand it!" cried Alice.

Eleanor paused as if in response to Alice's appeal, but a glance at her face showed that an emotion stronger than even the words had expressed was holding her in its grip.

"Father was dead, too, when I returned," she said at last, her eyes still gazing into s.p.a.ce.

"The excitement killed him?" Alice asked, breathlessly, still further shocked by the double tragedy.

"That and his anxiety over my unexplained absence."

"Your absence?" queried the girl, mystified by Eleanor's apparent incoherency. "Didn't you just say that he was dead when you returned?"

Mrs. Gorham started violently. "What am I saying!" she cried, involuntarily. In a moment she was herself again. "Yes, dear, of course I returned; but not as soon as he expected, and the shock of it all killed him. You understand, don't you? I was very ill, and a friend helped me to a hospital in Denver."

"But you said you had no friends except the man you married," Alice urged, trying to follow the narrative.

"Yes, dear, you are right," Eleanor replied somewhat confused; "but one always finds friends when in trouble, you know. It was so with me, and after I recovered my strength I lived on there in Denver with the small legacy my father left me, supplemented later by a little more from the sale of the ranch. A year after Carina's death I applied for a divorce, on the ground of desertion. My lawyer found Ralph somewhere to serve the summons on him, and reported him as having already become a professional gambler and a confirmed drunkard. He made no defence at the trial, and I have never seen him since."

"But it's all over now, Eleanor dear," Alice said, soothingly. "Daddy and I will try to make up to you for what you have been through. You must let us do that."

"You have done it already," Eleanor replied, feelingly, her temporary obsession having pa.s.sed. "You and darling little Patricia have become a real part of my life, and my one prayer has been that I could do as much for you. Your father restored my lost faith in men almost the first time I met him in my lawyer's office in Denver."

"Yes." Alice accepted the tribute to her father as a matter of fact. "He nearly killed himself in Pittsburgh before he gave up his business there, and he went out West two or three times to get back his health.

And the last time he brought you back, too. I have always loved the West for that."

Mrs. Gorham smiled as she continued: "I learned of his work from others and from himself, and rejoiced to find a man with real ideals, in business and in his every-day life, actually lived up to. I had no notion of what that first chance meeting would lead to, of the home that it would give me among my girlhood friends, filled with the love and sympathy which my heart had always craved. Now you know the whole story, Alice dear--now you know why the tears come sometimes to my eyes as I press to my heart that quaint, precious little sister of yours, so near the age Carina would have been, who softens the memory of the sweet dead face by giving to it a living reality."