“He hasn’t seen you!” said Agatha, coldly; “of course you made sure of that?”
The girl looked mischievously at the older woman. She ran her fingers through her hair—brown and vigorous-looking—then shaded her eyes with her hands and gazed at her reflection in a mirror near by. In deshabille she looked fresh and bewitching. She had looked like a radiant goddess to “Brand” Trevison, when he had accidentally caught a glimpse of her face at the window while she had been watching him. He had not known that the lady had just awakened from her beauty sleep. He would have sworn that she needed no beauty sleep. And he had deliberately ridden past the car again, hoping to get another glimpse of her. The girl smiled.
“I am not so positive about that, Aunty. Let us not be prudish. If he saw me, he made no sign, and therefore he is a gentleman.” She looked out of the window and smiled again. “There he is now, Aunty!”
It was Agatha who parted the curtains, this time. The horseman’s face was toward the window, and he saw her. An expression of puzzled astonishment glowed in his eyes, superseded quickly by disappointment, whereat Rosalind giggled softly and hid her tousled head in a pillow.
“The impertinent brute! Rosalind, he dared to look directly at me, and I am sure he would have winked at me in another instant! A gentleman!” she said, coldly.
“Don’t be severe, Aunty. I’m sure he is a gentleman, for all his curiosity. See—there he is, riding away without so much as looking back!”
Half an hour later the two women entered the dining-room just as a big, rather heavy-featured, but handsome man, came through the opposite door. He greeted both ladies effusively, and smilingly looked at his watch.
“You over-slept this morning, ladies—don’t you think? It’s after ten. I’ve been rummaging around town, getting acquainted. It’s rather an unfinished place, after the East. But in time—” He made a gesture, perhaps a silent prophecy that one day Manti would out-strip New York, and bowed the ladies to seats at table, talking while the colored waiter moved obsequiously about them.
“I thought at first that your father was over-enthusiastic about Manti, Miss Benham,” he continued. “But the more I see of it the firmer becomes my conviction that your father was right. There are tremendous possibilities for growth. Even now it is a rather fertile country. We shall make it hum, once the railroad and the dam are completed. It is a logical site for a town—there is no other within a hundred miles in any direction.”
“And you are to anticipate the town’s growth—isn’t that it, Mr. Corrigan?”