As she pushed aside some dresses suspended by hoops to a pole in the closet, Jerry's beaded hand-bag fell from a shelf above the hangings, and the fastening, loosened by the fall, let the contents roll out and lay exposed on the floor.
As Laura began to gather them up and put them back in their place, she saw her own silk purse stuffed tightly into the bottom of her guest's hand-bag. And then and there the poison tips of Stellar Bahrr's shafts began a festering sore deep and difficult to reach.
It was high noon when York Macpherson and his fair companion returned from the far side of the big Macpherson ranch. Jerry's hair was blown in ringlets about her forehead and neck. Her cheeks were blooming and her eyes were like stars. With the fresh morning breeze across the prairie, the exhilarating ride on horseback, and the novel interest in a ranch whose appointments were so unlike "Eden" and the other Winnowoc Valley farms, Jerry had the ecstasy of a new freedom to quicken her pulse-beat. She had solved her problem; now she was free for her romantic nature to expand. It was such a freedom as she had never in her wilful life known before, because it had a purpose in it such as she had never known before, a purpose in which the subconscious knowledge of dependence on somebody else, the subjection to somebody else's ultimate control, played no part.
To Laura Macpherson she seemed to have burst from the bud to the full-blown flower in one short forenoon.
York's face, however, was wearing that impenetrable mask that even his sister's keen and loving eyes could never pierce. He had been impenetrable often in the last few weeks. But of the York back of that unreadable face Laura was sure. Even in their mutual teasings the deep, brotherly affection was unwavering. As far as it lay in York's power he would never fail to make up to his companionable sister for what circumstances had taken from her. And yet—the substratum of her disturbed consciousness would send an upheaval to the surface now and then. All normal minds are made alike and played upon by the same influences. The difference lies in the intensity of control to subdue or yield to the force of these influences. Things had happened in that morning ride that York had planned merely for the beneficence of the prairie breezes upon the bewildered purposes of the guest of the house.
On the far side of the "Kingussie" ranch the two riders had halted in the shade of a clump of wild plum-trees beside the trail that follows the course of the Sage Brush. Below them a little creek wound through a shelving outcrop of shale, bordered by soft, steep earth banks wherever the shale disappeared. This Kingussie Creek was sometimes a swift, dangerous stream, but oftener it was a mere runlet with deep water-holes carved here and there in the yielding shale. Just now, at the approach of July heat, there was only a tiny thread of water trickling clear over yellow rock, or deep pools lying in muddy thickness in the stagnant places.
"Not much like the Winnowoc," York suggested, as his companion sat staring down at the stream-bed below.
"Everything is different here," Jerry said, meditatively. "I've traveled quite a little before; been as far as the White Mountains and the beautiful woodsy country up in York State. There's a lot of upness and downness to the scenery, but the people—except, of course—" Jerry smiled bewitchingly.
"Except Ponk, of course," York supplied, with a twinkle in his eyes.