Some sort of revolution seemed to be in progress in the room in which the travellers had breakfasted.  Mrs. Dax had assumed the office of dictator, with absolute sway.  Leander, as aide-de-camp, courier, and staff, executed marvellous feats of domestic engineering.  The late breakfast-table, swept and garnished with pigeon-holes, became a United States post-office, prepared to transact postal business, and for the time being to become the social centre of the surrounding country.

Down the yellow road that climbed and dipped and climbed and dipped again over foot-hills and sprawling space till it was lost in a world without end, Mary Carmichael, standing in the doorway, watched an atom, so small that it might have been a leaf blowing along in the wind, turn into a horseman.

There was inspiration for a hundred pictures in the way that horse was ridden.  No flashes of daylight between saddle and rider in the jolting, Eastern fashion, but the long, easy sweep that covers ground imperceptibly and is a delight to the eye.  It needed but the solitary figure to signify the infinitude of space in the background.  In all that great, wide world the only hint of life was the galloping horseman, the only sound the rhythmical ring of the nearing hoofs.  The rider, now close enough for Miss Carmichael to distinguish the features, was a thorough dandy of the saddle.  No slouching garb of exigence and comfort this, but a pretty display of doeskin gaiter, varnished boot, and smart riding-breeches.  The lad—­he could not have been, Miss Carmichael thought, more than twenty—­was tanned a splendid color not unlike the bloomy shading on a nasturtium.  And when the doughty horseman made out the girl standing in the doorway, he smiled with a lack of formality not suggested by the town-cut of his trappings.  Throwing the reins over the neck of the horse with the real Western fling, he slid from the saddle in a trice, and—­Mary Carmichael experienced something of the gasping horror of a shocked old lady as she made out two splendid braids of thick, black hair.  Her doughty cavalier was no cavalier at all, but a surprisingly handsome young woman.

Miss Carmichael gasped a little even as she extended her hand, for the masquerader had pulled off her gauntlet and held out hers as if she was conferring the freedom of the wilderness.  It was impossible for a homesick girl not to respond to such heartiness, though it was with difficulty at first that Mary kept her eyes on the girl’s face.  Curiosity, agreeably piqued, urged her to take another glimpse of the riding clothes that this young woman wore with such supreme unconcern.

Now, “in the East” Mary Carmichael had not been in the habit of meeting black-haired goddesses who rode astride and whose assurance of the pleasure of meeting her made her as self-conscious as on her first day at dancing-school; and though she tried to prove her cosmopolitanism by not betraying this, the attempt was rather a failure.