ntelligible mutter, and had
been glad to escape.

He became an habitual sight, riding a blooded mare through the valley,
over lonely trails, and was finally accepted as a recognized local
institution. His title and exotic garb, the grim quality of his manhood,
his austere disregard for bodily welfare, his unmistakable courage--more
than any other human quality extolled throughout Greenstream--became a
cause of prideful boasting in the County.

Gordon Makimmon had known Lettice Hollidew, now speaking in little,
girlish rushes behind him, since her first appearance in a baby carriage,
nineteen or twenty years back. He had watched her without particular
interest, the daughter of the richest man in Greenstream, grow out of
sturdy, barelegged childhood into the girl he had now for five years been
driving, in early summer and fall, to and from the boarding school at
Stenton.

She was, he had noted, reserved. Other schoolgirls, in their passages from
their scattered upland homes, were eager to share Gordon's seat by the
whip; and, with affected giggling, or ringing bursts of merriment, essayed
to drive the wise, heedless mountain horses. But Lettice Hollidew had
always shrunk from the prominent place on the stage; there was neither
banter nor invitation in her tones as she greeted him at the outset of
their repeated trips, or as she gravely thanked him at the end of the
day's journey.

Her father--he was reputed to possess almost half a million dollars--was a
silent man, suspicious and wary in his contact and dealings with the
world; and it was probable that those qualities had been softened in
Pompey Hollidew's daughter to a habit of diffidence, to a customary,
instinctive repression.

No such characteristics laid their restraint on Buckley Simmons, her
present companion. His immobile face, with its heavy, good features and
slow-kindling comprehension, was at all times expressive of loud
self-assertion, insatiable curiosity, facile confidence; from his clean
shaven lips fell always satisfied comment, pronouncement, impatient
opinion. If Hollidew was the richest man in Greenstream Valentine Simmons
was a close second. Indeed, one might be found as wealthy as the other; as
a matter of fact, the Simmons holdings in real estate, scattered broadcast
over the county, would realize more than Hollidew could readily
command--thus Valentine Simmons' son, Buckley.

He was elaborately garbed in grey serge, relentlessly shaped to c