or the recovery
of the queue.

Marguerite Delarue kept on with her quiet life through the summer,
caring for little Paul and attending to her father's house. She did
not see Emerson Mead again after the day when, with her little white
sunbonnet pulled over her disordered hair, she helped her baby brother
to mount his horse. Long before the summer was over she decided that
he cared nothing for her and that she must no longer feel more
interest in him than she did in any other casual acquaintance. But
sometimes she wakened suddenly, or started at her work, seeming to
feel the intent gaze of a pair of brown eyes. Then she would blush,
cry a little, and scold herself severely.

It was late in the summer when Albert Wellesly made his next visit to
Las Plumas. He had decided to buy a partly abandoned gold mine in the
Hermosa mountains, and he explained to Marguerite Delarue, as he sat
on her veranda the afternoon of his arrival, that he was making a
hurried visit to Las Plumas in order to give it a thorough
examination. And then he added in a lower tone and with a meaning look
in his eyes, that that was not the only reason for the trip. She
blushed with pleasure at this, and he felt well enough satisfied not
to go any farther just then.

He came to see her again after he returned from the mine. It was
Sunday afternoon, and they sat together on the veranda, behind the
rose and honeysuckle vines, with Marguerite's tea table between them.
He told her about his trip to the mine and what he thought of its
condition and deferentially asked her advice in some small matters
that had an ethical as well as a commercial bearing. She listened with
much pleasure and her blue eyes shone with the gratification that
filled her heart, for never before had a man, fighting his battles
with the world, turned aside to ask her whether or not he was doing
right. Then he told her how much he valued her judgment upon such
matters and how much he admired and reverenced the pure, high
standard of her life. His tones grew more lover-like as he said it
would mean far more to him than he could express if he might hope that
her sweet influence would some day come intimately into his own life.
Then he paused and looked at her lowered eyelids, bent head and
burning cheeks. But she said nothing, sitting as still as one dead,
save for her heaving breast. After a moment he went on, saying that he
cared more for her than for any other woman he had ever known