She danced her galop with Dakie Thayne, after she went back.  The cavalry captain was introduced, and asked for it.  “That was something,” as Hans Andersen would say; but “What a goose not to have managed better!” was what Imogen Thoresby thought concerning it, as the gold bars turned themselves away.

Leslie Goldthwaite had taken what came to her, and she had had an innocent, merry time; she had been glad to be dressed nicely, and to look her best:  but somehow she had not thought of that much, after all; the old uncomfortableness had not troubled her to-night.

“Just to be in better business.  That’s the whole of it,” she thought to herself, with her head upon the pillow.  She put it in words, mentally, in the same off-hand fashion in which she would have spoken it to Cousin Delight.  “One must look out for that, and keep at it. That’s the eye-stone-woman’s way; and it’s what has kept me from worrying and despising myself to-night.  It only happened so, this time; it was Mr. Wharne, not I. But I suppose one can always find something, by trying.  And the trying”—­The rest wandered off into a happy musing; and the musing merged into a dream.

Object and motive,—­the “seeking first;” she had touched upon that, at last, with a little comprehension of its working.

She liked Dakie Thayne.  The next day they saw a good deal of him; he joined himself gradually, but not obtrusively, to their party; they included him in their morning game of croquet.  This was at her instance; he was standing aside, not expecting to be counted in, though he had broken off his game of solitaire, and driven the balls up to the starting-stake, as they came out upon the ground.  The Thoresby set had ignored him, always, being too many already among themselves,—­and he was only a boy.

This morning there were only Imogen, and Etty, the youngest; a walking-party had gone off up the Cherry Mountain road, and Ginevra was upstairs, packing; for the Thoresbys had also suddenly decided to leave for Outledge on the morrow.  Mrs. Thoresby declared, in confidence, to Mrs. Linceford, that “old Wharne would make any house intolerable; and that Jefferson, at any rate, was no place for more than a week’s stay.”  She “wouldn’t have it mentioned in the house, however, that she was going, till the time came,—­it made such an ado; and everybody’s plans were at loose ends among the mountains, ready to fix themselves to anything at a day’s notice; they might have tomorrow’s stage loaded to crushing, if they did not take care.”

“But I thought Mrs. Devreaux and the Klines were with you,” remarked Mrs. Linceford.

“Of our party?  Oh, no indeed; we only fell in with them here.”