The newcomer’s reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could devise.  Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open mockery of that reserve, “Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was really most companionable about the house,” and paused with a sigh betokening a regretful comparison of values.  That lance shattered against her Lansdale shield like all the others.

Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as “the cosmic chill”.  The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in lavish abundance.

I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly when I was able to shape their destinies.  Thrice I lost interestingly and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit.

Even after that I must have recourse to the wonted philter to bring sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening self-possession.  I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.

I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor’s daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness of soft new snow in a cedar thicket.  Incidentally she partook of another quality of soft new snow—­one by no means so incommunicable.

And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate ancestry.  Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights, brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly.  It might never meet this young woman’s caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I detected beyond a doubt.  She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline, and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.

She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an easy-chair within my vined porch.  She went farther.  She affected a polite interest in myself.  But her craft was crude.  I detected at once that she had fallen in love with my dog; that she came not to seek me, but to follow him, who had raced joyously from her at his first knowledge of my home-coming.

I was secretly proud of the exquisite thoroughness with which he now ignored her.  Again and again he assured me in her very presence that the woman was nothing, could be nothing, to him.  I knew this well enough—­I needed no protestations from him; but I thought it was well that she should know it.  I saw that he had probably consented to receive her addresses through a long afternoon,