"Here's my card, too, Mr. Plunkett," cried the girl. She said something more, but the horses were made to plunge rapidly away, and the words were lost; but the flash of a white jewelled hand caught Luke's eye as a delicately tinted card came fluttering towards him. He sprang and seized it. If a bag of diamonds had been flung at his feet he could not have been more excited. His hands trembled. All the incidents of the only fairy tale he had ever read came at once into his mind. He stood with his feet turned in, like some great awkward boy, a bashful, shame-faced look lurking about his mouth and eyes. He filled his pipe and lighted it from the stump of his cigar with nervous eagerness. A squirrel came down to the lowest limbs of a beech tree hard by and barked at him, but he did not notice it. He read the names on the cards: "_Elliot Pearl, C. E._" "_Hoiden Pearl._" The first printed in small capitals, the second written in a delicate, rather cramped feminine hand. He stood for a long time dreamily employed in turning these bits of paper over and over. His thoughts were so vague in outline and so dim in filling up that they cannot be reproduced. They slipped away on the summer air, like little puffs of perfume, and were lost, to be found by many and many a one in the ineffable places of dreamland. Finally, shaking himself as if to break the charm that held him in its meshes, he took up his gun and slowly made his way homeward. All along his walk he kept smiling to himself and talking aloud, but his words were such that it would be sacrilege to repeat them now. Let them hover about in the sunlight of summer, where he uttered them, as things too delicate to be pressed between the lids of a book. Betsy had trouble with Luke for some days after this. He lay about the house, saying little, eating little, giving little attention to the many tenants who worked his estate. He was in good health, was not in trouble (so he said to his sister), but he did not care to be bothered with business. He was tired and would rest awhile. "He smoked pretty near all the time," as Betsy declared. But not a hint fell from his lips as to what might be running in his mind.