Ruth Carey had been accustomed to fend for herself nearly all her life. Her lot had been cast in a very narrow groove and it had not contained a single gleam of romance to make it beautiful. The whole of her early girlhood had been spent buried in a country vicarage utterly out of touch with all the rest of the world. Here she had lived with her grandfather leading a wild and free existence wholly independent of society hewing as it were a way for herself in a desert that was very empty and almost unthinkably barren.