looking at the sleeping girl laid
it on the open novel.

Waking an hour later, she chanced to look casually at the tabour. With a
little cry of pleasure she picked up the heart-shaped bit of moist moss
with its embedded cluster of mountain heart's-ease and her eyes were
very soft as she laid it to her lips. There was no uncertainty as to
their source; she knew that these were the first-offerings of the
season, procurably only in the hardly penetrable canyons of the range,
more than twenty dusty miles away, and she felt very grateful. She wore
them on her corsage that night at dinner and later, coming on him
smoking his post-prandial pipe under the stars, thanked him graciously.

As he muttered the conventional commonplaces of depreciation, his
gleaming eyes were riveted for a moment on the flowers. Something in the
intensity of his glance struck her like a blow; she paled and
instinctively covered the blossoms with both hands. Instantly her mind
reverted to her afternoon's siesta and her cheeks flamed with
consciousness. She was far from unsophistication; she had seen men look
so before but never with a similar acceleration of her heart-beats,
never with this fierce resentment which now coursed though her whole
being. She was quivering with a sense of vague outrage and her breath
came fast and hard. Then with the unaccountability of the unfathomable
feminine, she deliberately detached one of the dainty blooms and,
standing with the filmy laces on her bosom brushing against his chest,
deftly fastened it on the lapel of his coat. After all, the man had
ridden far that day for her pleasure, and she smiled inscrutably as she
recalled, on retiring that night, how his hands had clenched and his
breast heaved when she had given him the flower. The rest of the violets
were sadly wilted now and she threw them out of the window with a
sudden impatient anger.

But an hour later a great horned owl, watching from a fence post the
moonlit sward in front of the veranda in hopes of a possible mouse for
his belated supper, hooted his contemptuous derision of another
white-robed hunter groping in the shadows. And over at the bunkhouse a
man with self-revilement was fumbling with a spray of heart's-ease and
looking into vacancy.

When she came down to breakfast the next morning Douglass was already
far out on the range. He had thrown his whole heart and soul into his
work and the effect was already visible to the most casual observer.