"A beastly tame ending!" said Bunny in frank disappointment. "I hoped the fellow was going to break his neck."
The horseman was passing immediately below them. He looked up, and Maud coloured a guilty scarlet, realizing that he had overheard the remark. He had the most startlingly bright eyes she had ever seen. They met hers with a directness that seemed to pierce straight through her, and passed on unblinkingly to the boy in the long chair. There was something lynx-like in the straight regard, something so deliberately intent that it seemed formidable. His clean-shaven, weather-beaten face had an untamed, primitive look about it, as of one born in the wilderness. His mouth was rugged rather than coarse, but it was not the mouth of civilization.
Bunny, who was not easily daunted, looked hard back at him, with the brazen expression of one challenging a rebuke. But the horseman refused the challenge, passing on without a word.
"I’m tired," said Bunny, in sudden discontent. "Let’s go back!"
When he spoke in that tone, he was invariably beyond coaxing. Maud turned the chair without protest, and prepared to make that exhausting ascent.
"How slow you are to-day!" said Bunny peevishly. "I hate this beastly hill. You make me go up it on my head!"
The slant was certainly acute. Maud murmured sympathy. "I would pull you up if I could," she said.
He was plainly in an exacting mood. Her heart sank a little lower. "It’s no use trying, darling," she said. "I know I can’t. But I won’t take a minute longer over it than I can help."
"You never do anything decently," said Bunny in disgust.
Maud made no rejoinder. She bent in silence to her task.
Bunny could not see her face, and she strove desperately to control her panting breath.
"You puff like a grampus," the boy said discontentedly.
There came the quick fall of a horse’s hoofs behind them, and Maud bent her flushed face a little lower. She did not want to meet that piercing regard again. But the hoof-beats slackened behind her, and a voice spoke--a voice so curiously soft that at the first sound she almost believed it to be that of a woman.
She paused--it was inevitable--and looked round.
In the same moment he slid to the ground--a square, sturdy figure, shorter than she had imagined him when he was in the saddle, horsey of aspect, clumsy of build, possessing a breadth of chest that seemed to indicate vast strength.