Page:Caroline Lockhart--The full of the Moon.djvu/36

 She dressed quickly and stepped into the sunshine-flooded court of the one-story dobe hotel. It was to her romantic, youthful mind, like stepping into a new life in another world which was to be as interesting as the development of chapters in a book, with a dénouement which none could guess.

If Nan was interested in Hopedale, Hopedale reciprocated with a fervency which was little short of feverish. On the surface there was nothing to indicate the quivering curiosity of its inhabitants, and Nan could not know when she passed through the office on her way to the dining-room, that each casual lounger was a human interrogation point.

Nothing feminine in the least resembling Nan ever had appeared in Hopedale, and her social status, her excuse for being there, had been argued pro and con far into the night.

One of three reasons accounted for the few American women who came to this straggling adobe village fifty miles from the terminus of a branch railroad, and these reasons were, namely—relatives in the vicinity, deluded notions concerning Hopedale as a fertile field for canvassing for something, or the quite