With the other Hawkins children Laura had been brought up in the belief that they had inherited a fortune in the Tennessee Lands.  She did not by any means share all the delusion of the family; but her brain was not seldom busy with schemes about it.  Washington seemed to her only to dream of it and to be willing to wait for its riches to fall upon him in a golden shower; but she was impatient, and wished she were a man to take hold of the business.

“You men must enjoy your schemes and your activity and liberty to go about the world,” she said to Harry one day, when he had been talking of New York and Washington and his incessant engagements.

“Oh, yes,” replied that martyr to business, “it’s all well enough, if you don’t have too much of it, but it only has one object.”

“What is that?”

“If a woman doesn’t know, it’s useless to tell her.  What do you suppose I am staying in Hawkeye for, week after week, when I ought to be with my corps?”

“I suppose it’s your business with Col.  Sellers about Napoleon, you’ve always told me so,” answered Laura, with a look intended to contradict her words.

“And now I tell you that is all arranged, I suppose you’ll tell me I ought to go?”

“Harry!” exclaimed Laura, touching his arm and letting her pretty hand rest there a moment.  “Why should I want you to go away?  The only person in Hawkeye who understands me.”

“But you refuse to understand me,” replied Harry, flattered but still petulant.  “You are like an iceberg, when we are alone.”

Laura looked up with wonder in her great eyes, and something like a blush suffusing her face, followed by a look of langour that penetrated Harry’s heart as if it had been longing.

“Did I ever show any want of confidence in you, Harry?” And she gave him her hand, which Harry pressed with effusion—­something in her manner told him that he must be content with that favor.

It was always so.  She excited his hopes and denied him, inflamed his passion and restrained it, and wound him in her toils day by day.  To what purpose?  It was keen delight to Laura to prove that she had power over men.

Laura liked to hear about life at the east, and especially about the luxurious society in which Mr. Brierly moved when he was at home.  It pleased her imagination to fancy herself a queen in it.

“You should be a winter in Washington,” Harry said.

“But I have no acquaintances there.”

“Don’t know any of the families of the congressmen?  They like to have a pretty woman staying with them.”

“Not one.”

“Suppose Col.  Sellers should, have business there; say, about this Columbus River appropriation?”

“Sellers!” and Laura laughed.

“You needn’t laugh.  Queerer things have happened.  Sellers knows everybody from Missouri, and from the West, too, for that matter.  He’d introduce you to Washington life quick enough.  It doesn’t need a crowbar to break your way into society there as it does in Philadelphia.  It’s democratic, Washington is.  Money or beauty will open any door.  If I were a handsome woman, I shouldn’t want any better place than the capital to pick up a prince or a fortune.”