The hunters, meanwhile, had not been altogether successful in the chase.  The necessary wolf had been coy, and they, perforce, had to compromise with his poor relation, the coyote—­a poor relation, indeed, whose shabby coat, thinned by the process of summer shedding, made it an unworthy souvenir to Miss Colebrooke.  But it was not the lack of a wolf that robbed the hunting-party of its zest for Kitty.  She could not tell what it was, but something seemed to have gone wrong with the day from the beginning.  She rode beside her cavalier in a habit the like of which the country had never before seen, and Peter, usually the most observant of men, had no word for its multitude of perfections.  In the first realization of disappointment with the day, the hunt, the hardships of the long ride, her perturbed consciousness took up the problem of this missing element and tried to adjust itself to the irritating absence.  Kitty wondered if it were something she had forgotten.  No, there were her two little cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, remotely suggestive of orris, and bearing her monogram delicately wrought and characteristic.  It was not her watch, the ribbon fob of which fluttered now and then in the breeze.  It was not veil nor scarf-pin nor any of the paraphernalia of the properly garbed horsewoman.  And yet there was something missing, something she should have had with her, something the absence of which was taking the savor from the day’s hunting.

It must be the very bigness of this great, splendid world that gave her the sense of being alone at sea.  Intuitively she turned and looked at Peter riding beside her.  There was something in his face that made her look again before accepting the realization at first incredulously, then with frank amusement.  Peter had scarcely spoken since they left the ranch.  She had come down to breakfast so sure of her new riding-habit.  The Wetmore girls had been moved to hyperboles about its cut and fit and the trim shortness of the skirt—­short riding-skirts were something of a novelty then.  The fine gold hair, twisted tight at the back of the shapely head, was like a coiled mass of burnished metal, some safe-keeping device of mint or gold-worker till the season of coining or fashioning should come round.  The translucent flesh-tints, pearl-white flushing into pink—­“Bouguereau realized at last,” as Nannie Wetmore was in the habit of summing up her cousin’s complexion—­was as marvellous as ever.  The delicate firmness of profile gave to the face the artificial perfection of an old miniature, rather than of a flesh-and-blood countenance, and all these were there as of yore, but the marvel of them failed of the customary tribute.  Kitty, on scanty reflection, was at no loss to translate Peter’s reserve into a language at once flattering and retributive.  In her scheme of life he was always to be her devoted cavalier, as indeed he had been from the beginning.  She loved her own small eminence too well to imperil her tenure of it by sharing