ous sparkle to his eyes, but there was, too, a
masculine impulse he did not analyse.

"So you won't be friends?"

If he had gone about it the right way he might have found forgiveness
easily enough. But this did not happen to be the right way.

"No, I won't." And she gave him her profile again.

"Then we might as well have something worth while to quarrel about," he
said, and slipping his arm round her neck, he tilted her face toward
him.

With a low cry she twisted free, pushing him from her.

Beneath the fierce glow of her eyes his laughter was dashed. He forgot
his expected trivial triumph, for they flashed at him now no childish
petulance, but the scorn of a woman, a scorn in the heat of which his
vanity withered and the thing he had tried to do stood forth a bare
insult.

"How dare you!" she gasped.

Straight up the stairs to her room she ran, turned the lock, and threw
herself passionately on the bed. She hated him...hated him...hated him.
Over and over again she told herself this, crying it into the pillows
where she had hidden her hot cheeks. She would make him pay for this
insult some day. She would find a way to trample on him, to make him eat
dirt for this. Of course she would never speak to him again--never so
long as she lived. He had insulted her grossly. Her turbulent Southern
blood boiled with wrath. It was characteristic of the girl that she did
not once think of taking her grievance to her hot-headed father or to
her brother. She could pay her own debts without involving them. And it
was in character, too, that she did not let the inner tumult interfere
with her external duties.

As soon as she heard the stage breasting the hill, she was up from the
bed as swift as a panther and at her dressing-table dabbing with a
kerchief at the telltale eyes and cheeks. Before the passengers began
streaming into the house for dinner she was her competent self, had
already cast a supervising eye over Becky the cook and Manuel the
waiter, to see that everything was in readiness, and behind the official
cage had fallen to arranging the mail that had just come up from Noches
on the stage.

From this point of vantage she could cast an occasional look into the
dining-room to see that all was going well there. Once, glancing through
the window, she saw Tom Dixon in conversation with a half-grown
youngster in leathers, gauntlets, and spurs. A coin was changing hands
from the older boy to the younger, and as soo