“How am I to know whether it would be presuming?” she asked.

“But I was going to say—­”

“When rudely interrupted!” She was trying to make it easy for him to say whatever he wished.

“—­that these troubles of mine are really personal.  I have committed no crime and am not fleeing from justice.”

She laughed and urged her horse into a gallop for a last stretch of road near the park limits.

“How uninteresting!  We expect a Montana ranchman to have a spectacular past.”

“But not to carry it, I hope, to Washington.  On the range I might become a lawless bandit in the interest of picturesqueness; but here—­”

“Here in the world of frock-coated statesmen nothing really interesting is to be expected.”

She walked her horse again.  It occurred to her that he might wish an assurance of silence from her.  What she had seen would make a capital bit of gossip, to say nothing of being material for the newspapers, and her conscience, as she reflected, grew uneasy at the thought of shielding him.  She knew that her father and mother, and, even more strictly, her brother, would close their doors on a man whose enemies followed him over seas and lay in wait for him in a peaceful park; but here she tested him.  A man of breeding would not ask protection of a woman on whom he had no claim, and it was certainly not for her to establish an understanding with him in so strange and grave a matter.

“It must be fun having a ranch with cattle on a thousand hills.  I always wished my father would go in for a western place, but he can’t travel so far from home.  Our ranch is in Virginia.”

“You have a Virginia farm?  That is very interesting.”

“Yes; at Storm Springs.  It’s really beautiful down there,” she said simply.

It was on his tongue to tell her that he, too, owned a bit of Virginia soil, but he had just established himself as a Montana ranchman, and it seemed best not to multiply his places of residence.  He had, moreover, forgotten the name of the county in which his preserve lay.  He said, with truth: 

“I know nothing of Virginia or the South; but I have viewed the landscape from Arlington and some day I hope to go adventuring in the Virginia hills.”

“Then you should not overlook our valley.  I am sure there must be adventures waiting for somebody down there.  You can tell our place by the spring lamb on the hillside.  There’s a huge inn that offers the long-distance telephone and market reports and golf links and very good horses, and lots of people stop there as a matter of course in their flight between Florida and Newport.  They go up and down the coast like the mercury in a thermometer—­up when it’s warm, down when it’s cold.  There’s the secret of our mercurial temperament.”

A passing automobile frightened her horse, and he watched her perfect coolness in quieting the animal with rein and voice.