"Oh--are you going?" he asked, with undisguised disappointment. She regarded him in silence for a moment. How astonishingly like that boy he was--this six-foot--
"Of course I am going," she said, and wondered why she had said "of course" with emphasis. Then she whistled to her mare.
"May I ride with you to the house?" he asked, humbly.
She was going to say several things, all politely refusing. What she did say was, "Not this time."
Then she was furious with herself, and began to hate him fiercely, until she saw something in his face that startled her. The mare came up; she flung the bridle over hastily, set foot to metal, and seated herself in a flash. Then she looked down at the man beside her, prepared for his next remark.
It came at once. "When may we ride together, Miss Elliott?"
She became strangely indulgent. "You know," she said, as though instructing youth, "that the first proper thing to do is to call upon my father, because he is older than you, and he is physically unable to make the first call."
"Then by Wednesday we may ride?" he inquired, so guilessly that she broke into a peal of delicious laughter.
"So do I," she said. "I feel like a little girl in a muslin gown." Two spots of color tinted her cheeks. He had never seen such beauty in human guise, and he came very near saying so. Something in the aromatic mountain air was tempting her to recklessness. Amazed, exhilarated by the temptation, she sat there looking down at him; and her smile was perilously innocent and sweet.
"Once," she said, "I knew a boy--like you--when I wore a muslin frock, and I have never forgotten him. He was extremely silly."
She looked at him, still smiling. She gazed off through the forest, where the men were going home, shovels shouldered, the blades of axe and spade blood-red in the sunset light.
How long they stood there she scarcely reckoned, until a clear primrose light crept in among the trees, and the evening mist rose from an unseen pond, floating through the dimmed avenues of pines.
"Good-night," she said, gathered bridle, hesitated, then held out her ungloved hand.
Galloping homeward, the quick pressure of his hand still burning her palm, she swept along in a maze of disordered thought. And being by circumstances, though not by inclination, an orderly young woman, she attempted a mental reorganization. This she completed as she wheeled her mare into the main forest road; and, her happy, disordered thoughts rearranged with a layer of cold logic to quiet them, reaction came swiftly; her cheeks burned when she remembered her own attitude of half-accepted intimacy with this stranger. How did he regard her? How cheaply did he already hold her--this young man idling here in the forest for his own pleasure?