neral. "Why, bless my soul! I've slept
under the same blanket with Jake Preston twenty times. I was standing by
him when he got that bullet in his thigh. Did he tell you?"

Eugenia rose in a moment and went back to her flowers. As she passed she
threw a grateful glance at Dudley, but when she reached the garden it
was of Nicholas she was thinking. There was a glow at her heart that
kept alive the memory of his eyes as he looked at her in the wood, of
his voice when he called her name, of his hand when it brushed her own.

She fell happily to work, and when Dudley came out, an hour later, to
find her, she was singing softly as she uprooted a scarlet geranium.

He smiled and looked down on her with frank enjoyment of her ripening
womanhood, but it did not occur to him to join in the transplanting as
Nicholas would have done. He held off and absorbed the picture.

"You do papa so much good!" said Eugenia gratefully. "I hope you will
come out whenever you are in Kingsborough."

She was kneeling upon the ground, her hands buried in the flower-bed,
her firm arms rising white above the rich earth. The line of her bosom
rose and fell swiftly, and her breath came in soft pants. There was a
flush in her cheeks.

"If you wish it I will come," he answered impulsively. "I will come to
Kingsborough every week if you wish it."

His temperament responded promptly to the appeal of her beauty, and his
blood quickened as it did when women moved him. There was about him,
withal, a fantastic chivalry which succumbed to the glitter of false
sentiment. He would have made the remark had Eugenia been plain--but he
would not have come to Kingsborough.

"It would please your mother," returned the girl quietly. She had the
sexual self-poise of the Virginia woman, and she weighed the implied
compliment at its due value. Had he declared he would die for her once a
week, she would have received the assurance with much the same smiling
indifference.

"I'll run down, I think, pretty often this winter," he went on easily.
"It's a nice old town, after all--isn't it?"

"It's the dearest old town in the world," said Eugenia.

"Well, I believe it is--strange, I used to find it dull, don't you
think? By the way, will you let me ride with you sometimes? I hear you
are as great a horsewoman as ever."

Eugenia looked up calmly.

"I go very early," she answered. "Can you get up at daybreak?"

He laughed his pleasant laugh.

"Oh, I might manage