"When I find a horse I can't ride, Miss Sylvia, I guess I'll have to take up a new line. If your father would come and say it's all right----"
Even then he failed to grasp the fact that he guarded her for his own sake rather more than for her father's.
He nearly interfered when he heard her cry to her brother as they started off one morning:
"I'm going to ride harder from now on, Lambert. I've got to get fit for next winter. Coming out will take a lot of doing."
"If she rides any harder," he muttered, "she'll break her silly neck."
It angered him that she never spoke to him in that voice, with that easy manner. Perhaps his eagerness to be near her had led her to undervalue him. Somehow he would change all that, and he wanted her to stop calling him "Morton," as if he had been an ordinary groom, or an animal, but he would have to go slowly. Although he didn't realize the great fact then, he did know that he shrank from attempting anything that would take her away from him.
It was her harder riding, indeed, that opened his eyes, that ushered in the revolution.
It happened toward the close of a mid-July afternoon. Mud whirled from her horse's hoofs, plentifully sprinkling her humble guardian.
"Now what the devil's she up to?" he thought with a sharp fear.
She turned and rode at a gallop for a hedge, an uneven, thorny barrier that separated two low meadows. He put spurs to his horse, shouting:
"Hold up, Miss Sylvia! That's a rotten take-off."
Flushed and laughing, she glanced over her shoulder.
He realized afterward that it was as near intimacy as she had ever come.
He saw her horse refuse, straightening his knees and sliding in the marshy ground. He watched Sylvia, with an ease and grace nearly unbelievable, somersault across the hedge and out of sight in the meadow beyond.
No answer. He sprang from his horse, leaving it free to graze with hers. He stormed through the hedge, his heart choking him. She lay on her side, quite motionless, the high colour fled from her cheeks, her hair half down. Although the soft ground should have reassured him he was obsessed by the thought that she might never get up again.
In the warmth of his fear barriers were consumed. Within his horizon survived just two people, himself and this silent object of an extended, if unconscious, adoration.