ous sort of joy possessed them.

.........................

The discord of their thoughts was like music beside what had passed at
Tralee. There nothing relieved the black, sullen rage of Joel Mazarine.
He had returned to the house where his voice had always been able
to summon his slaves, and to know that they would come--Chinaman,
half-breed, wife. Now he called, and the wife did not come. On the new
chestnut she had ridden away on the prairie, so the halfbreed woman
had said, as hard as he could go. He had scanned the prairie till night
came, without seeing a sign of her.

His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might
do. It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative. He questioned
the half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and
then he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they
said; and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse
and galloped over to Slow Down Ranch. As he went, he kept swearing
to himself that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain
malignant. He could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he
arrived at Slow Down Ranch.

There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true,
for Orlando also had not returned. He saw it all. They had agreed to
meet; they had met; they had eloped and were gone! His beady eyes were
those of serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words
burst over the head of Orlando's mother like shrapnel.

For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than
herself, and declared that her son had never run away from, or with,
anything in his life; that he--Joel Mazarine--had never had anything
worth her son's running away with; and that her son, when he came back,
would make him ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his God.

Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her
maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering
curses which no class leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote
for pious purposes.

Joel Mazarine had flattered himself that he had everything life could
give--money, property and a garden of youth in which his old age could
loiter and be glad; and that he should be defied suddenly and his garden
made desolate, that the lines of his good fortune should be crossed,
caused him to rage like any heathen. His monstrous egotism made him like
some inf