the next night the male trio were strangely absorbed in some station
happening which did not arouse Miss Bouverie's curiosity in the least.
They were excited and yet constrained at dinner, and drew their chairs
close together on the veranda afterward. The young lady caught at least
one word of which she did not know the meaning. She had the tact to keep
out of earshot after that. Nor was she very much more interested when
she met the two young men with revolvers in their hands the following
day.

"Going to fight a duel?" she inquired, smilingly, for her heart was
still singing Grand Opera and Oratorio by turns.

"More or less," returned the overseer, without his usual pleasantry.
"We're going to have a match at a target behind the pines."

The London bookkeeper looked an anxious clerk: the girl was glad when
she saw the pair alive at dinner. There seemed to be little doing.
Though the summer was already tropical, there had been plenteous rains,
and Mr. Clarkson observed in Hilda's hearing that the recent day's
mustering would be the last for some little time. She was thrown much in
his company, and she liked Mr. Clarkson when Mrs. Clarkson was not
there. In his wife's hands the good man was wax; now a mere echo, now a
veritable claque in himself, he pandered indefatigably to the
multitudinous vanities of a ludicrously vain woman. But it was soon Miss
Bouverie's experience that he could, when he dared, be attentively
considerate of lesser ladies. And in many ways these were much the
happiest days that she had spent on the station.

They were, however, days of a consuming excitement for the caged and
gagged nightingale that Hilda Bouverie now conceived herself to be. She
sang not another note aloud. Mr. Clarkson lived in slippers on the
veranda, which Hilda now associated chiefly with a stranger's spurs: for
of the booted and spurred stranger she was thinking incessantly, though
still without the emotions of an ordinarily romantic temperament. Would
he be at the concert, or would he not? Would he turn out to be what she
firmly imagined him, or was she to find out her mistake? Might he not in
any case have said or written some pregnant word for her? Was it beyond
the bounds of possibility that she should be asked to sing after all?

The last question was the only one to be answered before the time,
unless a point-blank inquiry of Mrs. Clarkson be included in the
category. The lady had returned with a gorgeous gown, on