his veins. It actually was as though some wonderful, magnetic thing was
making his veins throb and every nerve tingle and sing.

"It beats me," he said to himself fifty times that day. He had never
been in love. He did not know what it was like, except that he had seen
it make men do silly things, just as drink did. He did not know whether
he was in love or not. It was absurd that a man should be in love with a
face at a window--a face with the beauty of a ghost rather than of a real
live woman.

Orlando had little evil in his nature; his eyes did not look towards
Tralee as did Burlingame's eyes. Nothing furtive stirred in Orlando's
intensely blue eyes. Whatever the feeling was, it was an open thing,
which had neither motive nor purpose behind it--just a thing almost
feminine in its nature. As yet it was like the involuntary adoration
which girls at a certain period of their lives feel successively for one
hero after another. What it would become, who could tell? What would
happen to the young girl adoring the actor, or the hero of the North
Pole, the battle-field or the sea, if the adored one was not far off, but
very near? Indeed, who could tell?

But as it was, in the upper room where Louise sat all day looking out
over the prairie, and on the prairie where business carried Orlando from
ranch to ranch on this perfect day, no recreant thought or feeling
existed. Each was a simple soul, as yet unspoiled and in one sense
unsophisticated--the girl, however, with an instinctive caution, such as
an animal possesses in the presence of a foe with which it is in truce;
the man with an astuteness which belonged to a native instinct for
finding a way of doing hard things in the battle of life.