The curtain had gone down on the first act when Gwynette and Charles appeared in the box. They were welcomed with smiles and nods and a few whispered words. Harold, from time to time, glanced back at his sister. She was positively radiant. Then he caught a look full of meaning that was exchanged by the girl and the man at her side.
It told its own story. Gwynette, the proud, haughty, domineering girl, had been won by a rancher. Her brother well knew how she had struggled against what she would call a misalliance, but Cupid had been the victor. Then he wondered what his mother would say. Involuntarily Harold glanced at the girl near whom he was sitting. Feeling his glance, she smiled up at him, and yet it was merely a smile of good comradeship. He would have to wait. Jenny was two years younger than her sister, and had never thought of love.
Gwynette went about in a dream. She and Charles had been for a sunrise sail (as Lenora had said that she and her brother had so often been on Lake Tahoe) and they had made their plans. Charles was to return to the Dakota ranch on scheduled time and work with his father during the summer, then, in the fall, he would return for his bride.
"Unless you change your mind and wish to marry someone in your _own_ class," he said, as hand in hand they returned to the big house. The girl flushed. "Don't!" she pleaded. Then, "I want to forget how worthless were my old ideals."
"And you wouldn't even marry the younger son of a noble English family, in preference to me, I mean, if you knew one and he asked you?" Gwyn thought the query a strange one, but looked up, replying with sweet sincerity: "No, Charles, I shall marry no one but _you_." Then she laughed. "What a queer question that was. A young nobleman is not very apt to ask _me_ to marry him."
There was a merry expression on the lad's handsome, wind and sun tanned face as he said: "Wrong there, Gwynette, for one _has_ asked you." Then, when he thought that he had mysterified her sufficiently, he continued: "Did you ever hear it rumored that a pupil of the Granger Place Seminary might, some day, have the right to the title 'My Lady'?"
Gwyn flushed. Even yet she did _not_ suspect the truth, and she feared Harold had told of her humiliation in giving a ball at The Palms in honor of a supposed daughter of nobility whose father proved to be a pigraiser. Rather coldly she said, "I had heard such a rumor, but we all decided that it was untrue."