For a moment, as he stood in the doorway, watching her, he had a vision. He saw her in the music-room at Oversite, her head outlined against the stained-glass window that he had helped Rachel choose, while Philip, restless, radiant, pervasive Philip, hung over the piano, turning her music, or looking at her with those adoring eyes of his. He shook his head impatiently, the picture vanished, and he went forward to the piano.

Leslie looked up with a smile, and though her fingers kept on playing, that appeared to offer no bar to their owner\'s conversing.

"It was very wise and kind of you to get father to talking about the Indians," she said, looking at him with grateful eyes. "It took his mind from these worrying affairs. He has a lot of enthusiasm for the Indians and the old times in the woods."

"That\'s the way we get credit we don\'t deserve, and miss praise that belongs to us," said Burton. "As De Bergerac said, \'I have done better since.\' But I drew your father out for purely selfish reasons. I wanted information. I am going up to the Reservation myself to-morrow to make a few inquiries."

"What if something happens while you are away?" she said, in evident alarm.

"It isn\'t likely to, while your brother is in jail."

She looked so dismayed and reproachful that he hastened to make his meaning clearer. "Oh, merely because this evil genius of his will be too shrewd to try anything on while your brother is so evidently and publicly out of the reckoning. I think you are quite safe for the immediate present. But at the same time I hope you will be very watchful, and if anything happens that is out of the ordinary, be sure to make a note of it, and let me know when I come back."

"What sort of things?" she asked, with wide eyes.

"If you see any one hanging about the house, or talking to Mrs. Bussey,--"

"Goodness! She talks to everybody!"

"Go on playing," said Burton softly. As she took up the thread of the melody with obedient fingers, though wondering eyes, he sauntered across the room and then suddenly turned into the hall as he passed the open doorway.

"Oh, Mrs. Bussey! Is that you?" he asked. "Did you want something?"

There was a sound of pattering feet, as the housekeeper hurried nervously away.

"She lacks invention," said Burton, as he came back to the piano. "It would have been so easy for her to pretend that she came to see if you wanted another lamp, or something of that sort."

"She is stupid past belief," said Leslie, in manifest annoyance.

"Does her habit of eavesdropping suggest nothing to you but idle curiosity?" Burton could not refrain from asking.

She looked startled. "No. You don\'t mean--"

"Oh, I am of an uncharitable nature, and I am ready to see something sinister in anything and everything. I don\'t want to sow seeds of distrust in your mind, but I\'m rather anxious to overlook no possible agency."

"I can\'t believe it is anything more than vulgar curiosity," said Leslie, after a thoughtful pause. "You know people of that sort have so little to occupy their minds that they become inordinately curious about the personal doings and sayings of the people they live among. I don\'t suppose a delivery wagon goes by in the street that Mrs. Bussey does not know about it, and speculate as to where it is going and what it is going to deliver at whose house. If she were not so curious about everything, I might feel that this was a more serious matter. But--she is so inefficient! I can\'t imagine her a mysterious conspirator!"

"Well, let\'s forget her. Won\'t you play some more for me?"

"I\'d rather talk," she said. "There are some things I want to ask you."

"That pleases me still better."

"I want you to tell me about Philip\'s mother."

"Very well," he said, but the eagerness had faded out of his voice. "What in particular?"

"You are a great friend of hers, are you not?"

"Yes,--an old friend."

"It was to please her, rather than Philip, that you came here?"

"Yes," he said. He knew that something more than this tame acquiescence was really due from him, but he felt suddenly as barren of invention as ever Mrs. Bussey could have been.

Leslie touched the keys of the piano softly and absent-mindedly as she asked her next question. "What does she look like? Is she very beautiful?"

"I have always thought so," said Burton. "She is a little woman, compared with you,--tiny, but very imperious and queenly. When she tells me to do a thing, I go and do it, without any objection."

"What would happen if you didn\'t?"

Burton laughed. "Goodness knows! I never tried it."

"Is she dark?"

"No, very fair."

"Then she probably looks younger than she is. How young does she look?"

"Oh,--as though she had been caught in an eddy somewhere between twenty-five and thirty!"

"And would stay there. I see. And she dresses exquisitely, doesn\'t she?"

"That is exactly the word for it."

"Is she contemptuous of those who do not dress exquisitely? Or merely tolerant?"

Burton felt rather uncomfortable under these probing questions, but he understood something of the girl\'s mood, and he could not resent the trace of defiance that he caught under rather than in her words. He therefore answered gently:

"I think that if she likes a person, she likes him whole-heartedly, and without regard to the accidental attributes. She will like you. She will love you."

"What makes you think so?" she asked, with her searching eyes steadily upon him.

"Why,--because Philip does, for one thing."

"But if it were not for that,--am I the sort of girl that she would be apt to like?"

"What sort of a girl are you?" he asked, with a smile. He knew that her last question held dangerous depths into which he did not care to look at that instant. Rachel was so--well, narrow in her social sympathies!

"Never mind that," said the girl, and he wondered uneasily whether she thought her last question had been sufficiently answered. "Tell me something about their place,--Oversite. That is the name of their estate at Putney?"

"Yes, and it is quite as important a place as the town that h............