She was a handsome young matron of thirty, a perfect specimen of the southern type of brunette, with black eyes and hair, and creamy skin. Married at eighteen to Anselm Brevoort, a millionaire thirty years her senior, she had lived the life of luxury and dissipation inseparable from her social station, and was therefore naturally blasé and a bit enervated. Yet, as she stood there in the soft candle light, uncoiling her luxuriant masses of hair, it was evident that excesses had left no traces on her splendid physique.
Her marriage had been one of convenience purely; she had from the very beginning frankly disavowed any love for the man who made her the mistress of his establishment and the custodian of his honor, and the waning years had not brought any accession of the tender passion. Brevoort was a very unemotional man at the best and was wholly engrossed in his business affairs, living for the better part of his time at the clubs or abroad. She was therefore thrown a great deal on her own resources for amusement, and it must be admitted that she made the most of the many opportunities accorded to every beautiful woman in her sphere. Her natural pride and discriminativeness had served her among temptations that would have been disastrous to a weaker nature.
So it was that at the end of her "dolorous dozen" as she whimsically called her years of marital anomaly, she had run the gamut of every danger incident to such a career and had escaped without a scar. And her self-confidence was commensurably great. It was her laughing boast that no man had ever given her a sensation other than those of charity and weariness, and she was irritatingly frank in her expressions to that effect, even to her victims. Her visit to the Carter ranch was merely a caprice, occasioned by Grace's enthusiastic laudations of her pet western plainsmen and her mischievous intimation that beyond the Rockies was a world impregnable to even the prowess of this female Alexander. Grace was not a little alarmed at the prompt acceptance of her inadvertent challenge by the finished coquette, who really had no design whatever on her protégés but only utilized it as an excuse to get away for a time from an environment productive of ennui. She had heartily tired of the silly game and really welcomed the distraction of a new and unique experience.
Nevertheless, she had gaily laid a wager with Grace that she would, in less than the allotted two-months of her stay, bedeck her belt with the scalp of every cowpuncher within a radius of ten miles from the C Bar. And when, as the day of their departure for the West approached, Miss Carter realized that Mrs. Brevoort was in earnest, she wished that she had been less urgent in her conventional invitation: it is ever a dubious venture, this turning of one's pet preserve over to the questionable mercies of a skillful and calloused hunter.
Well, there was no danger now, she was thinking with a sad sinking of heart, as she looked wistfully at a cluster of long-dried heart's-ease in her escritoire. It was over and done with, and that chapter of her life was closed forever. For Abbie had, in a fit of self-reproach, told her of her taunt on that eventful night and she had instantly divined his thoughts and deductions. Her first impulse had been to write him and indignantly deny—what? He had not given voice to any such belief in her duplicity, and how was she to assume that he entertained such a thought without giving color and grounds for his suspicion? And then, again, he had not left any address and it would be impossible to reach him by mail. She knew him well enough to know that he would never again look upon her willingly in his foolish and unjustified resentment, and the probabilities of a consistent explanation were all against her. He had never written her one word during her eastern sojourn; his letters had been all of a purely business nature, curt and brief, always addressed to her brother and only containing the conventionally-required remembrances to herself. And now the over-wide gulf was forever unbridgable. In her desolation and heartache she cried herself to sleep.
CHAPTER XV
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Constance Brevoort's two months had lengthened into five and it was now October. Her experience had been unique and so diverting that the attractions of the eastern metropolis had paled before the more virile and exciting possibilities of this life primitive, and it had required but slight persuasion on the part of the Carters to induce her to prolong her stay until the time of their own return to New York.
The healthful outdoor life, to which she took with avidity, had worked wonders for her really splendid and responsive constitution, and her normal great beauty had been freshened and intensified to a degree that made her conquest of the unsophisticated cowpunchers a thing of almost unenjoyable ease. With the single exception of Red, who loyally worshiped at the shrine of his first-loved divinity, every man for miles around did open and unblushing homage to the bewitching goddess, who found in their frank adoration a charm and satisfaction unknown to her previous inane piracies on the placid shallows of the social millpond. Out here on the high seas of unshackled independence, where every man was a viking in his own right and cruised with unbridled license through the deeps of his own will, each conquest was a victory to be written large on the tablet of her vanity. In her own land she had found many men who would languidly live for her favors; out here there was not one who would not eagerly die for the privilege of carrying out her most whimsical commands. And with womanly lack of philosophy she very much preferred those who would die to those who would live.