To do her justice, it should be said that Miss Wren had striven
valiantly against the impulse,--had indeed mastered it for several
hours,--but the sight of the vivid blush, the eager joy in the sweet
young face when Blakely's new "striker" handed in a note addressed to
Miss Angela Wren, proved far too potent a factor in the undoing of
that magnanimous resolve. The girl fled with her prize, instanter, to
her room, and thither, as she did not reappear, the aunt betook
herself within the hour. The note itself was neither long nor
effusive--merely a bright, cordial, friendly missive, protesting
against the idea that any apology had been due. There was but one line
which could be considered even mildly significant. "The little net,"
wrote Blakely, "has now a value that it never had before." Yet Angela
was snuggling that otherwise unimportant billet to her cheek when the
creaking stairway told her portentously of a solemn coming. Ten
minutes more and the note was lying neglected on the bureau, and
Angela stood at her window, gazing out over dreary miles of almost
desert landscape, of rock and shale and sand and cactus, with eyes
from which the light had fled, and a new, strange trouble biting at
her girlish heart. Confound No. 4--and Norah Shaughnessy!
It had been arranged that when the Plumes were ready to start, Mrs.
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