Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/316

 needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit.

Even after that I must have recourse to the wonted philter to bring sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening self-possession. I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.

I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor's daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness of soft new snow in a cedar thicket. Incidentally she partook of another quality of soft new snow—one by no means so incommunicable.

And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate ancestry. Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights, brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly. It might never meet this young woman's caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I detected beyond a doubt. She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline, and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.

She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an easy-chair within my vined porch. She went farther. She affected a polite interest in myself. But her craft was crude. I detected at once