“Mr. Armitage!” She laughed.  “I am almost caught in the dark.  The blandishments of spring have beguiled me.”

He looked at her with a quick scrutiny.  It did not seem possible that this could be the girl who had called to him in warning scarce five minutes before; but he knew it had been she,—­he would have known her voice anywhere in the world.  They rode silent beside the creek, which was like a laughing companion seeking to mock them into a cheerier mood.  At an opening through the hills they saw the western horizon aglow in tints of lemon deepening into gold and purple.  Save for the riot of the brook the world was at peace.  She met his eyes for an instant, and their gravity, and the firm lines in which his lips were set, showed that the shock of his encounter had not yet passed.

“You must think me a strange person, Miss Claiborne.  It seems inexplicable that a man’s life should be so menaced in a place like this.  If you had not called to me—­”

“Please don’t speak of that!  It was so terrible!”

“But I must speak of it!  Once before the same attempt was made—­that night on the King Edward.”

“Yes; I have not forgotten.”

“And to-day I have reason to believe that the same man watched his chance, for I have ridden here every day since I came, and he must have kept track of me.”

“But this is America, Mr. Armitage!”

“That does not help me with you.  You have every reason to resent my bringing you into such dangers,—­it is unpardonable—­indefensible!”

She saw that he was greatly troubled.

“But you couldn’t help my being in the park to-day!  I have often stopped just there before.  It’s a favorite place for meditations.  If you know the man—­”

“I know the man.”

“Then the law will certainly protect you, as you know very well.  He was a dreadful-looking person.  The police can undoubtedly find and lock him up.”

She was seeking to minimize the matter,—­to pass it off as a commonplace affair of every day.  They were walking their horses; the groom followed stolidly behind.

Armitage was silent, a look of great perplexity on his face.  When he spoke he was quite calm.

“Miss Claiborne, I must tell you that this is an affair in which I can’t ask help in the usual channels.  You will pardon me if I seem to make a mystery of what should be ordinarily a bit of business between myself and the police; but to give publicity to these attempts to injure me just now would be a mistake.  I could have caught that man there in the wood; but I let him go, for the reason—­for the reason that I want the men back of him to show themselves before I act.  But if it isn’t presuming—­”

He was quite himself again.  His voice was steady and deep with the ease and assurance that she liked in him.  She had marked to-day in his earnestness, more than at any other time, a slight, an almost indistinguishable trace of another tongue in his English.