The place was like Nola in its light and brightness and surface comfort and assertive color notes of happiness, hung about with the trophies of her short but victorious career among the hearts of men. There were photographs of youths on dressing-table, chiffonier, and walls, and flaring pennants of eastern universities and colleges. Among the latter, as if it was the most triumphant trophy of them all, there hung a little highland bonnet with a broken feather, of the plaid Alan Macdonald had worn on the night of Nola's mask. Frances went in for a nearer inspection, and lifted the little saucy bit of headgear from its place in the decorations of Nola's wall. There could be no doubting it; that was Alan Macdonald's bonnet, and there was a bullet hole in it at the stem of the little feather. The close-grazing lead had sheared the plume in two, and gone on its stinging way straight through the bonnet. An exclamation of tender pity rose above her breath. She fondled the little headdress and pressed it to her bosom; she laid it against her cheek and kissed it in consolation for its hurt--the woman's balsam for all sufferings and heartbreaks, and incomparable among the panaceas of all time. In spite of her sympathy for Nola in her grave situation, facing or undergoing what terrors no one knew, there was a bridling of resentment against her in Frances' breast as she hung the marred bonnet back in its place. It seemed to her that Nola had exulted over both herself and Alan Macdonald when she had put his bonnet on her wall, and that she had kept it there after the coming of Frances to that house in affront to friendship and mockery of the hospitality that she professed to extend. Nola had asked her to that house so that she might see it hanging there; she had arranged it and studied it with the cunning intent of giving her pain. And how close that bullet had come to him! It must have sheared his fair hair as it tore through and dashed the bonnet from his head. How she suffered in picturing his peril, happily outlived! How her heart trembled and her strong young limbs shook as she lived over in breathless agony the crisis of that night! He had carried her glove in his bonnet--she remembered the deft little movement of stowing it there just the moment before he bent and flashed away among the shadows. Excuse enough for losing it, indeed! But he had not told her of his escape to justify the loss; proudly he had accepted the blame, and turned away with the hurt of it in his unbending heart. She went back and took down the jaunty little cap again, and kissed it with compensatory tenderness, and left a jewel trembling on its crown from the well of her honest brown eye. If ever amends were made to any little highland bonnet in this world, then Alan Macdonald's was that bonnet, hanging there among the flaring pennants and trivial little schoolgirl trophies on Nola Chadron's wall.