he asked once.

"You were in Philadelphia when I was visiting Elsie, that was why.
Neither you nor Mr. Carington were in New York that month. I remember
that I got an idea that Elsie missed Mr. Carington, or you, or both. Mr.
Carington was in love with her, wasn't he?"

"Yes, he's always been in love with her, I think.--Do you like the
East?" he asked again, not caring for the subject of Miss Gossamer.

"To get an education in."

"You are well educated," he said, as though making comparisons.

In that matter of education, her selective abilities had been indeed
good. She had taken from her opportunities developmental elements and
used them within herself wisely. She had fine conceptions of art, she
was well-read; and because she had foreseen that she would be too rich
to have any separate use for the things of art and learning, she had
seized upon and welded all her inclinations and accomplishments into an
harmonious, delightful completeness as Woman. In the result, her
education seemed to be one of the especial reasons that you liked her.

"But as for that," said Steering, speaking his thought aloud, "reasons
don't count. There are plenty of reasons, but one really never gets at
the biggest reason of all."

"You hardly expect me to understand that," she said, laughing frankly, a
musical laugh that had in it the shaking, white flash of a rock-fluted
hill-stream.

"No, no! I don't expect you to understand that," he said.

They went on through the deep, odorous wood, down close to the river's
pale, shallow mystery again, and so back to the big gate at Madeira
Place. There at the gate the girl put out her hand to him again.

"Good-bye!" she said softly, "good-bye!"

As he bent to kiss the hand his breath came hard. "It is not good-bye,"
he said. "It shall not be. I swear it."

Then he dashed on down the ridge road toward Canaan, to find Crittenton
Madeira.

_Chapter Ten_

WHO'S GOT THE TIGMORES?

That Monday was hard on Madeira. It was his normal mental habit to come
to a conclusion instantly, and cut a way for it across other people's
ideas and notions with the impetus and onslaught of a cannon-ball. That
Monday his mentality was below--or above--normal. He kept telling
himself that he was mixed. His desire to crush Steering, pick him up and
crumple him and thrust him aside, stood before him constantly, like the
picture of the physical thing. Up to the time that he had seen his
daughter run out