ine duplicity that she had never before
encountered, and knew no more of than she did of the tumult that had
possession of poor Lucy's tormented soul. Here was the heroine of a
midnight rendezvous going about her work with her habitual nervous
capability, dressing the children, preparing the breakfast, seeing that
Bella was comfortably disposed on her mattress in the wagon. She had
not a glance for Zavier. Could a girl steal out to meet and kiss a man
in the moonlight and the next morning look at him with a limpid,
undrooping eye as devoid of consciousness as the eye of a preoccupied
cat?

The standards of the doctor's daughter were comparative and their range
limited. All she had to measure by was herself. Her imagination in
trying to compass such a situation with Susan Gillespie as the heroine,
could picture nothing as her portion but complete abasement and, of
course, a confession to her father. And how dreadful that would have
been! She could feel humiliation stealing on her at the thought of the
doctor's frowning displeasure. But Lucy had evidently told no one.
Why had she not? Why had she pretended not to like Zavier? Why? Why?
Susan found her thoughts trailing off into a perspective of questions
that brought up against a wall of incomprehension above which Lucy's
clear eyes looked at her with baffling secretiveness.

It was a warm morning, and the two girls sat in the doctor's wagon.
Lucy was knitting one of the everlasting stockings. In the heat she
had unfastened the neck of her blouse and turned the edges in, a
triangle of snowy skin visible below her sunburned throat. She looked
thin, her arms showing no curve from wrist to elbow, the lines of her
body delicately angular under the skimpy dress of faded lilac cotton.
The sun blazing through the canvas cast a tempered yellow light over
her that toned harmoniously with the brown coating of freckles and the
copper burnish of her hair. Her hands, vibrating over her work with
little hovering movements like birds about to light, now and then
flashing out a needle which she stabbed into her coiffure, were
large-boned and dexterous, the strong, unresting hands of the
frontierswoman.

Susan was lazy, leaning back on the up-piled sacks, watching the quick,
competent movements and the darts of light that leaped along the
needles. Before they had entered the wagon she had decided to speak to
Lucy of what she had overseen. In the first place she felt gui