She leaned back in her seat, laughing softly, though it was obviously a joke at her own expense as well as Tisdale’s.  “And I believed it,” she added.  “I believed it—­every word.”

Tisdale laughed too, a deep undernote.  “That sounds like Billy Foster.  I wager it was Foster.  Was it?” he asked.

She nodded affirmatively.

“Then Foster has met you.”  Tisdale’s voice rang a little.  “He knows you, after all.”

“Yes, he could hardly help knowing me.  His business interests are with my closest friends, the Morgansteins; they think a great deal of him.  And he happens to play a remarkably good hand at bridge; we always depend on him to make up a table when he is in town.”

Tisdale’s eyes rested a thoughtful moment on the road ahead.  Strange Foster never had mentioned her.  But that showed how blind, how completely infatuated with the Spanish woman the boy was.  His face set austerely.  Then suddenly he started; his grasp tightened on the reins so that the colts sprang to the sharp grade.  “Do you happen to know that enchantress, too?” he asked.

“Whom?” questioned Miss Armitage.

“I mean Mrs. Weatherbee.  I believe she counts the Morgansteins among her friends, and you said you were staying at Vivian Court, where her apartments are.”

“Oh, yes, I know—­her.  I”—­the color flamed and went in her face; her glance fell once more to the steep slope, searching out the narrowing stream through the trees.  “I—­’ve known Beatriz Weatherbee all my life.  I—­I think a great deal of her.”

“Madam, madam!” Tisdale protested, “don’t tell me that.  You have known her, lived near her, perhaps, in California, those years when you were growing up; shared the intimacies young girls enjoy.  I understand all that, but don’t say you care anything for her now.”

Miss Armitage lifted her face.  Her eyes did not sparkle then; they flamed.  “Why shouldn’t I, Mr. Tisdale?  And who are you to disparage Beatriz Weatherbee?  You never have known her.  What right have you to condemn her?”

“This right, Miss Armitage; she destroyed David Weatherbee.  And I know what a life was lost, what a man was sacrificed.”

CHAPTER VII

A NIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN ROAD

They drove on for a long interval in silence.  The colts, sobered by the sharp pull to the divide, kept an even pace now that they had struck the down-grade, and Tisdale’s gaze, hard still, uncompromising, remained fixed absently on the winding road.  Once, when the woman beside him ventured to look in his face, she drew herself a little more erect and aloof.  She must have seen the futility of her effort to defend her friend, and the fire that had flashed in her eyes had as quickly died.  It was as though she felt the iron out-cropping in this man and shrank from him baffled, almost afraid.  Yet she held her head high, and the delicate lines, etched again at the corners of her mouth, gave it a saving touch of decision or fortitude.