"

Boone, the bluntly direct of speech, was coming on in the less
straitened domain of the figurative. Anne was teaching him the bright
lessons of gaiety.

She laughed and drew back her shoulders with a mock hauteur. "Our
Viceroy from the Mountain Dominions flatters us. We have, however, the
Mother Dowager--and we approach the age for a suitable alliance."

The two horses were standing so close together that the riders were
almost knee to knee, and just then they had the hilltop to themselves.
The humorous smile that had been on the lips of the young mountaineer
vanished as characters on a slate are obliterated under a sponge. His
cheeks, still bronzed from a mountain summer, went suddenly pale--and
he found nothing to say. What was there to say, he reflected? When the
mentor of a man's common sense has forewarned him that he is being
shadowed by an inevitable spectre, and when that spectre steps suddenly
out into his path, he should not be astonished. Boone only sat there
with features branded under the shock of suffering. His fine young
shoulders, all at once, seemed to lose something of their straight
vigour and to grow tired. His palms rested inertly on his saddle pommel.

But the girl leaned impulsively forward and laid one of her gloved hands
over his. Her voice was a caress--touched with only a pardonable trace
of reproach.

"Do you doubt me, dear?" she asked. "In those politics that you are
playing, I don't see anybody giving up--because there is opposition
ahead."

Then the momentary despair altered in his manner to a grim expression of
determination.

"Forgive me, Anne," he begged. "It's not that I doubt you--or ever could
doubt you; but I know right well what a big word 'suitable' is in your
mother's whole plan of life."

"I know it, too," was her grave response. "Mother's life has been an
unhappy one, and she has given it all to me. That's why I say I have
enough politics of my own. I couldn't bear to break her heart--and her
heart is set on Morgan. So you see it's going to take some doing."

"Anne," he spoke firmly, but a tremour of feeling crept into his voice,
"Mrs. Masters loves you with such a big and single love that it can't
reason. Her own sufferings have come from knowing poverty, after she'd
taken wealth for granted--so that is the one danger she'll guard against
for you. It's an obsession with her. All the other things that might
wreck your life--such as marrying a man you didn't love,