That wonderful elation of youth on its first excursion into perfumed
meads of Love possessed him. He had never had flutterings of the heart
for any woman until his eyes met the eyes of Louise at their first
meeting, and a new world had been opened up to him. He had been as naive
and native a human being with all his apparent foppishness, as had ever
moved among men. What seemed his vanity had nothing to do with thoughts
of womankind. It had been a decorative sense come honestly from
picturesque forebears, and indeed from his own mother.
In truth, until the day he had met Louise, or rather until the day of the
broncho-busting, and the fateful night on the prairie, he had never grown
up. He was wise with the wisdom of a child--sheer instinct, rightness of
mind, real decision of character. His giggling laugh had been the
undisciplined simplicity of the child, which, when he had reached
manhood, had never been formalized by conventions. Something indefinite
had marked him until Louise had come, and now he was definite,
determined, alive with a new feeling which made his spirit sing--his
spirit and his lips; for, as he came from Nolan Doyle's ranch to the
Cross Trails, he kept humming to himself, between moments of silence in
which he visualized Louise in a hundred attitudes, as he had seen her.
There had come to him, without the asking even, that which Joel Mazarine,
had he been as rich as any man alive or dead, could not have bought.
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