“Come, dear Karl, forget this idle dream.  Be once more my brother and my helper.  Trust me, no one cares more for you so than I; not Kitty herself.”

He took the hand, put it to his lips, then rode on silently.

Dora’s kind eyes sought his again and again, but vainly.  His face, pale and somewhat stern gave no clew to the feelings within:  the mouth, more firmly set than its wont, seemed sealed to love forever.

For the first time in all the interview, Dora found herself troubled and perplexed.  Here was nothing to soothe, nothing to combat, nothing to answer or to silence; and her womanly sympathies fluttered about this manly reticence like a humming-bird around a flower frozen into the heart of an iceberg.

At last, she spoke; and her voice had grown almost caressing in its softness:—­

“You’re not angry with me, Karl?”

He glanced at her, then away.

“Certainly not, Dora.  On the contrary, I am much obliged to you.”

“Obliged to me!” exclaimed Dora; her feminine pique just touched a trifle.  “What, for saying no?”

“For showing me that I am a fool.  It was time I knew it, and I had rather hear it from you than any one.  Why should you care for me?  I am not a man to respect, like Mr. Brown, or one to admire, like Mr. Burroughs,—­I suppose it will be one of them; but I only hope either one may give you half—­No matter, wait here a moment in the shade.  I am going back to speak to Kitty.”

He sharply wheeled his horse as he spoke, and was gone.  Dora looked after him in sorrowful perplexity, and then tears gathered in her eyes; but, before they could fall, the unswerving rectitude underlying her whole nature came to its relief, and she dashed them away, murmuring,—­

“But I was right.”

CHAPTER XXXV.

The second chance.

Reining up her horse under the shadow of a clump of trees, Dora waited, as her cousin had requested, for his return; and so much pre-occupied was she with her own thoughts, that she failed to hear the quick footfalls of an approaching horse, until his rider slackened speed beside her, and Dora, looking up, saw that it was Mr. Brown.

She grew a little pale, divining, not only from the presence of the chaplain, but from a joyous and significant light in the eyes that encountered hers, what might be his errand; and though she had not failed to foresee this moment, no man, and surely no woman, is ever so prepared for the great crises of life that they fail to come at the last with almost as much of a shock as if they came quite unawares.

She turned her horse into the track, and rode on, her eyes fixed upon the wide prairie-view, which seemed to dance and shimmer before them as if all Nature had suddenly grown as strange and unreal as she felt herself.  Her companion spoke, and in her ears his voice sounded as from some far mountain-cave, hollow, broken, and vague; and yet the words were far from momentous.