All the rest of the day that look was with him. He could not understand it, though her mood while seated upon the porch was perfectly comprehensible to him.
The following Sunday morning he saddled up one of the horses and went down to church. He reasoned Edith would attend the Episcopal service, and he had the pleasure of seeing her pass up the aisle most exquisitely dressed.
This feeling of pleasure was turned to sadness by sober second thought. Added to the prostration before his ideal was the feeling that she belonged to another world—a world of pleasure and wealth, a world without work or worry. This feeling was strengthened by the atmosphere of the beautiful little church, fragrant with flowers, delicately shadowed, tremulous with music.
He rode home in deep meditation. It was curious how subjective he was becoming. She had not seen him there, and his trip lacked so much of being a success. Life seemed hardly worth living as he took off his best suit and went out to feed the horses.
The men soon observed the regularity of these Sunday excursions, and the word was passed around that Arthur went down to see his girl, and they set themselves to find out who she was. They did not suspect that he sought the Major's niece.
It was a keen delight to see her, even at that distance. To get one look from her, or to see her eyelashes fall over her brown eyes, paid him for all his trouble, and yet it left him hungrier at heart than before.
Sometimes he got seated in such wise that he could see the fine line of her cheek and chin. He noticed also her growing color. The free life she lived in the face of the mountain winds was doing her good.
Sometimes he went at night to the song service, and his rides home alone on the plain, with the shadowy mountains over there massed in the starlit sky, were most wonderful experiences.
As he rose and fell on his broncho's steady gallop, he took off his hat to let the wind stir his hair. Riding thus, exalted thus, one night he shaped a desperate resolution. He determined to call on her just as he used to visit the girls at Viroqua with whom he was on the same intimacy of footing.
He was as good as any class. He was not as good as she was, for he lacked her sweetness and purity of heart, but merely the fact that she lived in a great house and wore beautiful garments, did not exclude him from calling upon her.