arther and made love--a very shadowy, intangible sort of love,
in a very indefinite sort of way.

Albert Wellesly usually made love to whatever woman happened to be at
hand, if he had nothing else to do, or if he thought it would advance
his interests. With men he was keen and forceful, studying them
shrewdly, seeing quickly their weak points, turning these to his own
advantage, and helping himself over their heads by every means he
could grasp. In his dealings and relations with women he aimed at the
same masterful result, but while with men this might be attained in
many ways, with women he held there was but one way, and that was to
make love to them.

Marguerite bade him good-by with the same deep pain still in her
heart, but pleased in spite of herself. His words had been laden
heavily with the honey of admiration of a sort that to her serious
nature was most pleasing, while about them had hovered the faintest,
most elusive aroma of love. In her thought, she went over their long
conversation again and again, and dwelt on all that he had said with
constant delight. For to women admiration is always pleasing, even
though they may know it to be insincere. To young women it is a wine
that makes them feel themselves rulers of the earth, and to their
elders it is a cordial which makes them forget their years.

Marguerite Delarue had had little experience with either love or
admiration. Her heart had been virgin ground when her face had first
flushed under the look in Emerson Mead's brown eyes. And the first
words of love to fall upon her ears had been the uncertain ones of
Wellesly that afternoon. She conned them over to herself, saying that
of course they meant only that he was a high-minded gentleman who
admired high ideals. She repeated all that he had said on the subject
of Mead's guilt.

"He seemed fair and unprejudiced," she thought, "but I can not believe
it without certain proof. I know more about Mr. Mead than some of
those who think they know so much, for I have seen him with my little
Bye-Bye, and until they can prove what they say I shall believe him
just as good as he seems to be."

So she locked up in her heart her belief in Mead's innocence, saying
nothing about the matter to any one, till after a little that belief
came to be like a secret treasure, hidden away from all other eyes,
but in her own thought held most dear.

CHAPTER VI

The jail at Las Plumas was a spreading, one-story adobe