As yet it was like the involuntary adoration
which girls at a certain period of their lives feel successively for one
hero after another. What it would become, who could tell? What would
happen to the young girl adoring the actor, or the hero of the North
Pole, the battle-field or the sea, if the adored one was not far off, but
very near? Indeed, who could tell?
But as it was, in the upper room where Louise sat all day looking out
over the prairie, and on the prairie where business carried Orlando from
ranch to ranch on this perfect day, no recreant thought or feeling
existed. Each was a simple soul, as yet unspoiled and in one sense
unsophisticated--the girl, however, with an instinctive caution, such as
an animal possesses in the presence of a foe with which it is in truce;
the man with an astuteness which belonged to a native instinct for
finding a way of doing hard things in the battle of life.
All day Orlando wondered when he should see that face again; all day the
eyes of Louise pleaded for another look at the ranchman with the dress of
a dandy, the laugh of a child, and the face of an Apollo--or so it seemed
to her. It was the sort of day which ministers to human emotion, which
stirs the sluggish blood, revives the drooping spirit. There was a
curious, delicate blueness of the sky over which an infinitely more
delicate veil of mist was softly drawn.
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