“Fence!” She flung it back at him with a note of fear. The sound of that brought him abreast her. Stark and black, the rails sprang out at him. He saw a glittering mist where the other side should have been—heard voices shouting through the fog—shouting them to stop. He snatched for the mare’s bit. She swerved—she sprang to the spur. He saw Julia’s profile, white on white, flash past him. His ears were full of his own name—her voice calling his name—as the roan leaped upward.
To Thair and Holden, blundering down the field, seeing six feet in front of them, came a sound—the dull, unresonant drop of a body falling from a height—a cry, suddenly cut off. Involuntarily they halted. Thair peered into the obscurity. Holden halloed. The silence was dreadful. They edged cautiously forward, expecting a hail for direction. Then suddenly out of the fog the black mare plunged on them, empty saddle, flying rein.
“E-e-easy!” muttered Thair, leading forward cautiously.
Now the stark line of the fence rose up; now, almost abreast of it, they saw the roan on the far side, standing, head tossed; and near him, vague as ghosts, two figures, one kneeling by one prone in the long, wet grass.
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FLORENCE watched the riders down the terrace with a curious sense of participation in the race.
The whole thing had gone with such reckless abandon! What had happened to set Julia, with her hot glitter, headlong on such an escapade, to drag Longacre so doggedly after her? Her presentiment recurred to Florence with a hopeless drop of courage—that, after all, it had been too late! In freeing him, then, had she simply thrust him from her over a precipice?
She saw from the veranda the pink coats crowding through the drive gate. She heard around her voices exclaiming, reassuring, complaining. The riders had left behind them confusion of a petty, biting quality. She felt her endurance at snapping-point. She wanted to get out to “Tres Pinos,” to stand on the rocky point, above the tumult of the sea, and shout against the shouting breakers.
Instead she walked among oleanders and pampas plumes with a rigorous composure. The placid face of the garden, with its blended sweets and colors, was cloying; the passionless blue sky, defiant.