"Clang!" went the elevator, stopping at the floor. Dolly abruptly became again a very dignified little lady. Once out on the street, however, she went straightway to the milliner's, where she purchased almost with the last of her bank account the coveted fall hat. It was a furry toque, with a white aigrette; it came down to her ears and made her look like a little Cossack.
CHAPTER XIII
On the other side of the continent, Charles-Norton's retreat began to be haunted.
He was taking his flight above the lake, one morning, in the cool gold of sunrise, when suddenly a suspicion, a vague sensing of peril, passed like a cloud between him and the light. Immediately he let himself eddy to the beach, and there, stretched low along the sand, with craning neck he peered carefully about him.
At first he could see nothing. Twice he half rose to resume his flight, but each time flattened out again to the same subtle sense of presence. And at last, with a thump of his heart, he saw him—on the edge of the meadow, a man upon a horse, in the dusk of the pines.
They stood there, man and beast, framed by the pines, immobile and silent. The horse was a beautiful silken white, with a bridle of twisted rawhide heavily plaqued with silver; the saddle, of high-pommeled Spanish style, was also heavily incrusted; and the man sat it as though he had been poured molten into it. He wore a wide, flapping sombrero, set cavalierly upon long white hair that descended to the shoulders of his fringed buckskin jacket; the belt at his waist drooped loosely to the weight of a great holster, out of which protruded the lustrous butt of a silver-mounted revolver; long gleaming boots rose to his hips, their toes within carved tapaderos, their heels, high to the point of feminity, roweled with long rotary spurs.