ordinary
prudence demanded that she should know something more of him first. She
gave him her hand constrainedly; he pressed it warmly.

Dr. Duchesne drove up, helped him into the buggy, smiled a good-natured
but half-perfunctory assurance that he would look after "her patient,"
and drove away.

The whole thing was over, but so unexpectedly, so suddenly, so
unromantically, so unsatisfactorily, that, although her common sense
told her that it was perfectly natural, proper, business-like, and
reasonable, and, above all, final and complete, she did not know whether
to laugh or be angry. Yet this was her parting from the man who had but
a few days ago moved her to tears with a single hopeless gesture.
Well, this would teach her what to expect. Well, what had she expected?
Nothing!

Yet for the rest of the day she was unreasonably irritable, and, if the
conjointure be not paradoxical, severely practical, and inhumanly
just. Falling foul of some presumption of Miguel's, based upon his
prescriptive rights through long service on the estate, with the
recollection of her severity towards his antagonist in her mind, she
rated that trusted retainer with such pitiless equity and unfeminine
logic that his hot Latin blood chilled in his veins, and he stood livid
on the road. Then, informing Dick Shipley with equally relentless calm
that she might feel it necessary to change ALL her foremen unless
they could agree in harmony, she sought the dignified seclusion of
her castle. But her respected parents, whose triumphant relief at the
stranger's departure had emboldened them to await her return in their
porch with bended bows of invective and lifted javelins of aggression,
recoiled before the resistless helm of this cold-browed Minerva, who
galloped contemptuously past them.

Nevertheless, she sat late that night at her desk. The cold moon looked
down upon her window, and lit up the empty porch where her silent guest
had mutely watched her. For a moment she regretted that he had recovered
his reason, excusing herself on the practical ground that he would never
have known his dependence, and he would have been better cared for
by her. She felt restless and uneasy. This slight divergence from the
practical groove in which her life had been set had disturbed her in
many other things, and given her the first views of the narrowness of
it.

Suddenly she heard a step in the porch. The lateness of the hour,
perhaps some other reason, see