was unable to come sooner; I am sorry."

For love is content with little while it is young.

Agnes thought of her prettiest dress, tucked away in the little
steamer-trunk, and brought it out. It was not extremely gay, but it was
light in color and fabric, and gave a softness to the lines of the body,
and a freshness of youth. And one needs to look carefully to that when
one is seven-and-twenty, she reflected.

Her fingers fluttered over her hair; she swayed and turned before the
glass, bringing the lines of her neck into critical inspection. There
was the turn of youth there yet, it comforted her to see, and some
degree of comeliness. He would come soon, and she must be at her best,
to show him that she believed in him, and give him to understand that
she was celebrating his triumph over the contrary forces which he had
whipped like a man.

Faith, thought she, as she sat by the window and looked down upon the
crowd which still hung about the land-office, was a sustaining food.
Without it the business of all the world would cease. She had found need
to draw heavily upon it in her years, which she passed in fleeting
review as she looked pensively upon the crowd, which seemed floundering
aimlessly in the sun.

All at once the crowd seemed to resolve into one personality, or to
become but the incidental background for one man; a tall man with a
slight stoop, whose heavy eyebrows met above his nose like two black
caterpillars which had clinched in a combat to contest the passage. Here
and there he moved as if seeking somebody, familiarly greeted,
familiarly returning the salutations.

That morning she had seen him at the head of the line of men waiting to
file on land, close beside Peterson, who believed himself to be Number
One. She had wondered then what his interest might be, and it was
largely due to a desire to avoid being seen by him that she had hurried
away. Now he turned as if her thoughts had burned upon his back like a
sunglass, looked directly toward her window, lifted his hat, and
smiled.

As if his quest had come to an end at the sight of her, he pushed across
the street and came toward the hotel. She left the window, closing it
hurriedly, a shadow of fear in her face, her hand pressed to her bosom,
as if that meeting of eyes had broken the lethargy of some old pain. She
waited, standing in the center of the room, as if for a summons which
she dreaded to hear.

The hotel at Meander had not at that day