To be sure, she was not at all the sort of woman he had expected to love, therefore he loved her the more; nor was she the sort he had chosen as his ideal.  But it is this abandonment of old ideals and acceptance of new ones which marks development, which signalizes youth’s evolution into maturity.  She was a never-ending surprise to Pierce, and the fact that she remained a well of mystery, an unsounded deep that defied his attempts at exploration, excited his imagination and led him to clothe her with every admirable trait, in no few of which she was, of course, entirely lacking.

He was very boyish about this love of his.  Lacking confidence to make known his feelings, he undertook to conceal them and believed he had succeeded.  No doubt he had, so far as the men in his party were concerned—­they were far too busy to give thought to affairs other than their own—­but the woman had marked his very first surrender and now read him like an open page, from day to day.  His blind, unreasoning loyalty, his complete acquiescence to her desires, his extravagant joy in doing her will, would have told her the truth even without the aid of those numerous little things which every woman understands.  Now, oddly enough, the effect upon her was only a little less disturbing than upon him, for this first boy-love was a thing which no good woman could have treated lightly:  its simplicity, its purity, its unselfishness were different to anything she had known—­so different, for instance, to that affection which Count Courteau had bestowed upon her as to seem almost sacred—­therefore she watched its growth with gratification not unmixed with apprehension.  It was flattering and yet it gave her cause for some uneasiness.

As a matter of fact, Phillips was boyish only in this one regard; in other things he was very much of a man—­more of a man than any one the Countess had met in a long time—­and she derived unusual satisfaction from the mere privilege of depending upon him.  This pleasure was so keen at times that she allowed her thoughts to take strange shape, and was stirred by yearnings, by impulses, by foolish fancies that reminded her of her girlhood days.

The boat-building had proceeded with such despatch thanks largely to Phillips, that the time for departure was close at hand, and inasmuch as there still remained a reasonable margin of safety the Countess began to feel the first certainty of success.  While she was not disposed to quarrel with such a happy state of affairs, nevertheless one thing continued to bother her:  she could not understand why interference had failed to come from the Kirby crowd.  She had expected it, for Sam Kirby had the name of being a hard, conscienceless man, and Danny Royal had given proof that he was not above resorting to desperate means to gain time.  Why, therefore, they had made no effort to hire her men away from her, especially as men were almost unobtainable here at Linderman, was something that baffled her.  She had learned by bitter experience to put trust in no man, and this, coupled perhaps with the natural suspicion of her sex, combined to excite her liveliest curiosity and her deepest concern; she could not overcome the fear that this unspoken truce concealed some sinister design.