“With horses, too,” she added gayly.  And the smile breaking from her violet eyes silenced him in the magic of a beauty he had never dreamed of.  At first she mistook his silence for modesty; then—­because even as young a maid as she is quick to divine and fine of instinct—­she too fell silent and serious, the while the shuttles of her reason flew like lightning, weaving the picture of him she had conceived—­a gentleman, a man of her own sort, rather splendid and wise and bewildering.  The portrait completed, there was no room for the hint of presumption she had half sensed in the brown eyes’ glance that had set her alert; and she looked up at him again, frankly, a trifle curiously.

“I am going to thank you once more,” she said, “and ask you to put me up.  There is not a flutter of fear in my pulse now.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Perfectly.”

They arose; he untied the horse and beckoned it to the walk’s edge.

“I forgot,” she said, laughing, “that I am riding cross saddle.  I can mount without troubling you—­” She set her toe to the stirrup which he held, and swung herself up into the saddle with a breezy “Thanks, awfully,” and sat there gathering her bridle.

Had she said enough?  How coldly her own thanks rang in her ears—­for perhaps he had saved her neck—­and perhaps not.  Busy with curb and snaffle reins, head bent, into her oval face a tint of color crept.  Did he think she treated lightly, flippantly, the courage which became him so?  Or was he already bored by her acknowledgment of it?  Sensitive, dreading to expose youth and inexperience to the amused smile of this attractive young man of the world, she sat fumbling with her bridle, conscious that he stood beside her, hat in hand, looking up at her.  She could delay no longer; the bridle had been shifted and reshifted to the last second of procrastination.  She must say something or go.

Meeting his eyes, she smiled and leaned a little forward in her saddle as though to speak, but his brown eyes troubled her, and all she could say was “Thank you—­good-by,” and galloped off down the vista through dim, leafy depths heavy with the incense of lilac and syringa.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

II

THE IDLER

Concerning the Young Man in the Ditch and His Attempts to Get Out of It

Although he was not vindictive, he did not care to owe anything to anybody who might be inclined to give him a hearing on account of former obligations or his social position.  Everybody knew he had gone to smash; everybody, he very soon discovered, was naturally afraid of being bothered by him.  The dread of the overfed that an underfed member of the community may request a seat at the table he now understood perfectly.  He was learning.

So he solicited aid from nobody whom he had known in former days; neither from those who had aided him when he needed no aid, nor those who owed their comfortable position to the generosity of his father—­a gentleman notorious for making fortunes for his friends.