had gone to her
sister, who had placed her in a trying position. She thought it was
most inconsiderate.

Hope walked slowly across the veranda when the others had gone, and
watched the carriage as long as it remained in sight. Then she threw
herself into a big arm-chair, and looked down upon her pretty frock and
her new dancing-slippers. She, too, felt badly used.

The moonlight fell all about her, as it had on the first night of their
arrival, a month before, but now it seemed cold and cheerless, and gave
an added sense of loneliness to the silent house. She did not go
inside to read, as she had promised to do, but sat for the next hour
looking out across the harbor. She could not blame Alice. She
considered that Alice always moved by rules and precedents, like a
queen in a game of chess, and she wondered why. It made life so tame
and uninteresting, and yet people invariably admired Alice, and some
one had spoken of her as the noblest example of the modern gentlewoman.
She was sure she could not grow up to be any thing like that. She was
quite confident that she was going to disappoint her family. She
wondered if people would like her better if she were discreet like
Alice, and less like her brother Ted. If Mr. Clay, for instance, would
like her better? She wondered if he disapproved of her riding on the
engine with MacWilliams, and of her tearing through the mines on her
pony, and spearing with a lance of sugar-cane at the mongrel curs that
ran to snap at his flanks. She remembered his look of astonished
amusement the day he had caught her in this impromptu pig-sticking, and
she felt herself growing red at the recollection. She was sure he
thought her a tomboy. Probably he never thought of her at all.

Hope leaned back in the chair and looked up at the stars above the
mountains and tried to think of any of her heroes and princes in
fiction who had gone through such interesting experiences as had Mr.
Clay. Some of them had done so, but they were creatures in a book and
this hero was alive, and she knew him, and had probably made him
despise her as a silly little girl who was scolded and sent off to bed
like a disobedient child. Hope felt a choking in her throat and
something like a tear creep to her eyes: but she was surprised to find
that the fact did not make her ashamed of herself. She owned that she
was wounded and disappointed, and to make it harder she could not help
picturing Alice and Clay l