love, because he knows everything; but that
charming girl would have been shocked and wounded to the most indignant
humiliation if she had fancied that her friends thought that. Nay, more,
if Henderson had at this moment made by letter a proposal for her hand,
her impulse would have been to repudiate the offer as unjustified by
anything that had taken place, and she would no doubt have obeyed that
impulse.

But something occurred, while she was in this mood, that did not shock
her maidenly self-consciousness, nor throw her into antagonism, but
which did bring her face to face with a possible reality. And this was
simply the receipt of a letter from Henderson; not a love-letter--far
enough from that--but one in which there was a certain tone and
intention that the most inexperienced would recognize as possibly
serious. Aside from the announcement in the letter, the very fact of
writing it was significant, conveying an intimation that the reader
might be interested in what concerned the writer. The letter was longer
than it need have been, for one thing, as if the pen, once started
on its errand, ran on con amore. The writer was coming to Brandon;
business, to be sure, was the excuse; but why should it have been
necessary to announce to her a business visit? There crept into the
letter somehow a good deal about his daily life, linked, to be sure,
with mention of places and people in which she had recently an interest.
He had been in Washington, and there were slight sketches of well-known
characters in Congress and in the Government; he had been in Chicago,
and even as far as Denver, and there were little pictures of scenes that
might amuse her. There was no special mystery about all this travel and
hurrying from place to place, but it gave Margaret a sense of varied and
large occupations that she did not understand. Through it all there was
the personality that had been recently so much in her thoughts. He was
coming. That was a very solid fact that she must meet. And she did not
doubt that he was coming to see her, and soon. That was a definite and
very different idea from the dim belief that he would come some time. He
had signed himself hers "faithfully."

It was a letter that could not be answered like the other one; for it
raised questions and prospects, and the thousand doubts that make one
hesitate in any definite step; and, besides, she pleased herself to
think that she did not know her own mind. He had not aske