But Leslie had decided. She could not, with effrontery of selfishness,
take the last possible place,--a place already asked for by another. She
thanked Dakie Thayne, and, with just one little secret sigh, got into
the interior, placing herself by the farther door.

At that moment she missed something. "I've left my brown veil in your
room, Mrs. Linceford,"--and she was about to alight again to go for it.

"I'll fetch it," cried Dakie Thayne from overhead, and, as he spoke,
came down on her side by the wheel, and, springing around to the house
entrance, disappeared up the stairs.

"Ginevra!" Then there came a laugh and a shout and some crinoline
against the forward open corner of the coach, and Ginevra Thoresby was
by the driver's side. A little ashamed, in spite of herself, though it
was done under cover of a joke; but "All's fair among the mountains,"
somebody said, and "Possession's nine points," said another, and the
laugh was with her, seemingly.

Dakie Thayne flushed up, hot, without a word, when he came out, an
instant after.

"I'm _so_ sorry!" said Leslie, with real regret, accented with honest
indignation.

"It's your place," called out a rough man, who made the third upon the
coach-box. "Why don't you stick up for it?"

The color went down slowly in the boy's face, and a pride came up in his
eye. He put his hand to his cap, with a little irony of deference, and