towards the cover. From her window, unseen, she followed his neat
little figure moving undeviatingly on, without looking to the left
or right, and still less towards the house he had just quitted.
Then she saw the sunlight flash on cross-belt plates and steel
barrels, and a light blue line issued from out the dark green
bushes, round the point, and disappeared. And then it suddenly
occurred to her what she had been doing! This, then, was her first
step towards that fancy she had so lately conceived, quarrelled
over with her brother, and lay awake last night to place anew, in
spite of all opposition! This was her brilliant idea of dazzling
and subduing Logport and the Fort! Had she grown silly, or what
had happened? Could she have dreamed of the coming of this
whipper-snapper, with his insufferable airs, after that beggarly
deserter? I am afraid that for a few moments the miserable
fugitive had as small a place in Maggie's sympathy as the
redoubtable whipper-snapper himself. And now the cherished dream
of triumph and conquest was over! What a "looney" she had been!
Instead of inviting him in, and outdoing him in "company manners,"
and "fooling" him about the deserter, and then blazing upon him
afterwards at Logport in the glory of her first spent wealth and
finery, she had driven him away!

And now "he'll go and tell--tell the Fort girls of his hairbreadth
escape from the claws of the Kingfisher's daughter!"

The thought brought a few bitter tears to her eyes, but she wiped
them away. The thought brought also the terrible conviction that
Jim was right, that there could be nothing but open antagonism
between them and the traducers of their parents, as she herself had
instinctively shown! But she presently wiped that conviction away