d to keep.
Who would imagine dignified Miss Raynor peeping admiringly at
handsome Rex, screened by the shadows of the alders!"

"Now don't be ridiculous, Grace, or I shall be tempted not to tell you
the most interesting part," returned Miss Raynor, flushing hotly.

"Oh, that would be too cruel," cried Grace, who delighted on anything
bordering on mystery. "Do tell it."

"Well," continued Miss Raynor, dropping her voice to a lower key,
"when he was quite opposite me, he suddenly stopped short and quickly
dismounted from his horse, and picked up from the roadside a handful
of wild flowers."

"What in the world could he want with them?" cried Grace, incredulously.

"Want with them!" echoed Miss Raynor. "Why, he pressed them to his
lips, murmuring passionate, loving words over them. For one brief
instant his face was turned toward me, and I saw there were tears
standing in his eyes, and there was a look on his face I shall never
forget to my dying day. There was such hopeless woe upon it--indeed
one might have almost supposed, by the expression of his face, he was
waiting for his death-sentence to be pronounced instead of a marriage
ceremony, which was to give him the queenly heiress of Whitestone Hall
for a bride."

"Perhaps there is some hidden romance in the life of handsome Rex the
world does not know of," suggested Grace, sagely.

"I hope not," replied Miss Raynor. "I would hate to be a rival of
Pluma Hurlhurst's. I have often thought, as I watched her with Rex, it
must be terrible to worship one person so madly. I have often thought
Pluma's a perilous love."

"Do not speak so," cried Grace. "You horrify me. Whenever I see her
face I am afraid those words will be ringing in my ears--a perilous
love."

Miss Raynor made some laughing rejoinder which Pluma, white and
trembling behind the ivy vines, did not catch, and still discussing
the affair, they moved on, leaving Pluma Hurlhurst standing alone,
face to face with the truth, which she had hoped against hope was
false. Rex, who was so soon to be her husband, was certainly not her
lover.

Her keen judgment had told her long ago all this had come about
through his mother's influence.

Every word those careless lips had uttered came back to her heart with
a cruel stab.

"Even my guests are noticing his coldness," she cried, with a
hysterical little sob. "They are saying to each other, 'He does not
love me'--I, who have counted my triumphs by the scores. I