She will be a sister to us, dearest. Courage! All will
come right yet. Trust to me."
An hysterical laugh came to Mrs. Horncastle's lips and then stopped.
For as she looked up at him in his supreme hopefulness, his divine
confidence in himself and others--at his handsome face beaming with
love and happiness, and his clear gray eyes glittering with an almost
spiritual prescience--she, woman of the world and bitter experience,
and perfectly cognizant of her own and Kitty's possibilities, was,
nevertheless, completely carried away by her lover's optimism. For of
all optimism that of love is the most convincing. Dear boy!--for he was
but a boy in experience--only his love for her could work this magic. So
she gave him kiss for kiss, largely believing, largely hoping, that Mrs.
Barker was in love with Van Loo and would NOT return. And in this hope
an invincible belief in the folly of her own sex soothed and sustained
her.
"We must go now, dearest," said Barker, pointing to the sun already near
the meridian. Three hours had fled, they knew not how. "I will bring
you back to the hill again, but there we had better separate, you taking
your way alone to the hotel as you came, and I will go a little way on
the road to the Divide and return later. Keep your own counsel about
Kitty for her sake and ours; perhaps no one else may know the truth
yet." With a farewell kiss they plunged again hand in hand through the
cool bracken and again through the hot manzanita bushes, and so parted
on the hilltop, as they had never parted before, leaving their whole
world behind them.
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