wires; she watched him leap on his
horse again, and ride furiously down the road until he was lost to
view below the dip in the slope toward the valley. And still for some
minutes she stood staring at the place where he had disappeared. Then,
left alone with her pent-up emotions, she no longer resisted them.
Tears of vexation started in her eyes; chagrin, resentment, anger
swept over her in turn. She dug the heel of one small boot into the
unoffending soil--his soil--and thrust her clenched hands down at her
side.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" she cried, over and over again, striding forward and
back across some yards of pasture, trampling lilies and harebells
under her heedless feet, turning her flaming face at intervals toward
the spot in the smiling landscape that had last held the figure of
Philip Haig.

The shame of it! She had never--never--never been treated so
outrageously. It was unendurable--and she had endured it! She flung
herself down on the ground and wept.

* * * * *

Marion was now facing life alone. Her nearest remaining relative was
her cousin, Claire Huntington. Her mother--a Southern girl who might
have stepped out of a panel by Fragonard, so fine and soft and
Old-World-like was her beauty--had died when she was still a child.
Her father, Doctor Gaylord, was the antithesis of the sprite-like
creature he had married,--a big, athletic, outdoor sort of man, with
truly violent red hair and beard, whose favorite expression about
himself had been that a very capable pirate had been sacrificed to
make a tolerable physician. But he had prospered in his profession;
and then had died with amazing suddenness, leaving his estate in an
almost hopeless mess.

Robert Hillyer had tackled the problem,--Robert, the alert, the
busy, the supremely confident, the typical money-getter of the
money-worshipping metropolis. He had long been deeply in love with
Marion, but he had not made great headway in his suit, despite the
advantage of Doctor Gaylord's approval. Now, having saved enough out
of the estate (for so he said, though he never told Marion the
details of that miracle) to provide her with an income barely
sufficient to keep her in comfort but not in the luxury to which she
had been accustomed, he plainly expected his reward. And this was to
Marion an intolerable situation. She did not love Robert. She liked
him, admired him, trusted him; no more. Knowing her father's wishes,
she