He did not tell her the name. She noticed that, and noted it the way she would have noted a dropped letter in a line of type, and she let it alone, because she thought a man who would not say a name before he was sure of it was a man worth letting alone.
What he said instead was that the ranch was eleven miles north, that he had come in with the wagon because he had not known what he would be fetching, and that she was welcome to ride out with him and see the place and sleep there that night, or he would take her to the hotel, which was called the Territorial and was clean, and pay for her room himself until she decided what she wanted to do.
"I'm not going to the hotel," Linnet said.
"It might be more proper."
"I have come two thousand miles because of letters written in your kitchen, Mr. Morgan. I would like to see the kitchen."
He looked at her for a long moment, and for the first time since she had stepped off the train she saw something like a smile, not on his mouth but somewhere around his eyes. "Caleb would have liked you," he said, and then looked as though he wished he had not, and went to bring the wagon around.
Before they left town he stopped at the post office. It was a narrow room at the back of the general store, with a wall of pigeonholes and a counter worn pale in the middle where people leaned. The postmistress was a broad, gray-haired woman with spectacles pushed up into her hair and a pencil behind one ear, and when Nehemiah came in she put down the scale she was working and said, "Well? Was it a lady?"
"It was," Nehemiah said. "Fenna, this is Miss Rudd, from Pennsylvania. Miss Rudd, Mrs. Gault."
Fenna Gault looked at Linnet over the counter with frank and comprehensive interest, from her hat to her boots and back, and something in her face changed. "Oh," she said. "Oh, my dear. You're the Reading letters."