He caught her before her foot became entangled in the long folds of her skirt, drew her to himself, and held her.  What he murmured was inaudible to the others; but a tint redder than roses are swam to her cheek, and a smile broke over her face like a reflection in rippling water.  She held his arm tightly in her hand, and erect and proud, as it were with a new life, bent toward Roger Raleigh.

“You see!” said she.  “My husband loves me.  And I,—­it seems at this moment that I have never loved any other than him!”

There came a quick step along the matting, the handle of the door turned in Marguerite’s resisting grasp, and Mrs. Purcell’s light muslins swept through.  Mr. Raleigh advanced to meet her,—­a singular light upon his face, a strange accent of happiness in his voice.

“Since you seem to be a part of the affair,” she said in a low tone, while her lip quivered with anger and scorn, “concerning which I have this moment been informed, pray, take to Mr. Lauderdale my brother’s request to enter the house of Day, Knight, and Company, from this day.”

“Has he made such a request?” asked Mr. Raleigh.

“He shall make it!” she murmured swiftly, and was gone.

That night a telegram flashed over the wires, and thenceforth, on the great financial tide, the ship Day, Knight, and Company lowered its peak to none.

The day crept through until evening, deepening into genuine heat, and Marguerite sat waiting for Mr. Raleigh to come and bid her farewell.  It seemed that his plans were altered, or possibly he was gone, and at sunset she went out alone.  The cardinals that here and there showed their red caps above the bank, the wild roses that still lined the way, the grapes that blossomed and reddened and ripened year after year ungathered, did not once lift her eyes.  She sat down, at last, on an old fallen trunk cushioned with moss, half of it forever wet in the brook that babbled to the lake, and waited for the day to quench itself in coolness and darkness.

“Ah!” said Mr. Raleigh, leaping from the other side of the brook to the mossy trunk, “is it you?  I have been seeking you, and what sprite sends you to me?”

“I thought you were going away,” she said, abruptly.

“That is a broken paving-stone,” he answered, seating himself beside her, and throwing his hat on the grass.

“You asked me, yesterday, if I confessed to being a myth,” she said, after a time.  “If I should go back to Martinique, I should become one in your remembrance,—­should I not?  You would think of me just as you would have thought of the Dryad yesterday, if she had stepped from the tree and stepped back again?”

“Are you going to Martinique?” he asked, with a total change of face and manner.

“I don’t know.  I am tired of this; and I cannot live on an ice-field.  I had such life at the South!  It is ’as if a rose should shut and be a bud again.’  I need my native weather, heat and sea.”