And whatever else I am, surely I'm not a coward!" Margaret had indulged in no masculine ingenuities of logic.

Woman-like, she had gone straight to the practical point: Craig had written instead of coming--he was, therefore, afraid of her.

Having written he had not fled, but had come--he was, therefore, attracted by her still.

Obviously the game lay in her own hands, for what more could woman ask than that a man be both afraid and attracted?
A little management and she not only would save herself from the threatened humiliation of being jilted--jilted by an uncouth nobody of a Josh Craig!--but also would have him in durance, to punish his presumption at her own good pleasure as to time and manner.

If Joshua Craig, hardy plodder in the arduous pathway from plowboy to President, could have seen what was in the mind so delicately and so aristocratically entempled in that graceful, slender, ultra-feminine body of Margaret Severence's, as she descended the stairs, putting fresh gloves upon her beautiful, idle hands, he would have borrowed wings of the wind and would have fled as from a gorgon.
But as she entered the room nothing could have seemed less formidable except to the heart.