The maid who served Shirley noted with surprise the long pauses in which her young mistress sat staring across the table lost in reverie.  A pretty picture was Shirley in these intervals:  one hand raised to her cheek, bright from the sting of the spring wind in the hills.  Her forearm, white and firm and strong, was circled by a band of Roman gold, the only ornament she wore, and when she lifted her hand with its quick deft gesture, the trinket flashed away from her wrist and clasped the warm flesh as though in joy of the closer intimacy.  Her hair was swept up high from her brow; her nose, straight, like her father’s, was saved from arrogance by a sensitive mouth, all eloquent of kindness and wholesome mirth—­but we take unfair advantage!  A girl dining in candle-light with only her dreams for company should be safe from impertinent eyes.

She had kept Dick’s letter till the last.  He wrote often and in the key of his talk.  She dropped a lump of sugar into her coffee-cup and read his hurried scrawl: 

“What do you think has happened now?  I have fourteen dollars’ worth of telegrams from Sanderson—­wiring from some God-forsaken hole in Montana, that it’s all rot about Armitage being that fake Baron von Kissel.  The newspaper accounts of the expose at my supper party had just reached him, and he says Armitage was on his (Armitage’s) ranch all that summer the noble baron was devastating our northern sea-coast.  Where, may I ask, does this leave me?  And what cad gave that story to the papers?  And where and who is John Armitage?  Keep this mum for the present—­even from the governor.  If Sanderson is right, Armitage will undoubtedly turn up again—­he has a weakness for turning up in your neighborhood!—­and sooner or later he’s bound to settle accounts with Chauvenet.  Now that I think of it, who in the devil is he!  And why didn’t Armitage call him down there at the club?  As I think over the whole business my mind grows addled, and I feel as though I had been kicked by a horse.”

* * * * *

Shirley laughed softly, keeping the note open before her and referring to it musingly as she stirred her coffee.  She could not answer any of Dick’s questions, but her interest in the contest between Armitage and Chauvenet was intensified by this latest turn in the affair.  She read for an hour in the library, but the air was close, and she threw aside her book, drew on a light coat and went out upon the veranda.  A storm was stealing down from the hills, and the fitful wind tasted of rain.  She walked the length of the veranda several times, then paused at the farther end of it, where steps led out into the pergola.  There was still a mist of starlight, and she looked out upon the vague outlines of the garden with thoughts of its needs and the gardener’s work for the morrow.  Then she was aware of a light step far out in the pergola, and listened carelessly to mark it, thinking it one of the house servants returning from a neighbor’s; but the sound was furtive, and as she waited it ceased abruptly.  She was about to turn into the house to summon help when she heard a stir in the shrubbery in quite another part of the garden, and in a moment the stooping figure of a man moved swiftly toward the pergola.