pen arms, and
swallowed her in them as she leaped from the bottom tread. Major King
did not wait to see her emerge again, rosy and lip-tempting. There was
unfinished business within the colonel's room.

A few minutes later Nola, excited to her finger-ends, was retailing
the story of the rustlers' uprising to Frances.

"Mother's all worked up over it; she's afraid they'll burn us out and
murder us, but of course we'd clean them up before they'd ever get
_that_ far down the river."

"It looks to me like a very serious situation for everybody
concerned," Frances said. "If your father brings in the men that you
say he's gone to Meander to telegraph for, there's going to be a lot
of killing done on both sides."

"Father says he's going to clean them out for good this time--they've
cost us thousands of dollars in the past three years. Oh, you can't
understand what a low-down bunch of scrubs those rustlers are!"

"Maybe not," Frances said, giving it up with a little sigh.

"I've got to go back to mother this morning, right away, but that
little fuss up the river doesn't need to keep you from going home with
me as you promised, Frances."

"I shouldn't mind, but I don't believe father will want me to go out
into your wild country. I really want to go--I want to look around in
your garden for a glove that I lost there on the night of the ball."

"Oh, why didn't you tell me?" Nola's face seemed to clear of
something, a shadow of perplexity, it seemed, that Frances had seen in
it from time to time since her coming there. She looked frankly and
reprovingly at Frances.

"I didn't miss it until I was leaving, and I didn't want to delay the
rest of them to look for it. It really doesn't matter."

"It's a wonder mother didn't find it; she's always prowling around
among the flowers," said Nola, her eyes fixed in abstracted stare, as
if she was thinking deeply of something apart from what her words
expressed.

What she was considering, indeed, was that her little scheme of
alienation had failed. Major King, she told herself, had not returned
the glove to Frances. For all his lightness in the matter, perhaps he
cared deeply for Frances, and would be more difficult to wean than she
had thought. It would have to be begun anew. That Frances was ignorant
of her treachery, as she now fully believed, made it easier. So the
little lady told herself, surveying the situation in her quick brain,
and deceiving herself completely, as man