It was
the first time he had been alone with her since the afternoon at Battle
Field when she confessed her marriage and he his love.

"Bandit was lame," she said when it seemed necessary to say something.

She rode a thoroughbred, Bandit, who would let no one else mount him;
whenever she got a new saddle she herself had to help put it on, so
alert was he for schemes to entrap him to some other's service. He
obeyed her in the haughty, nervous way characteristic of
thoroughbreds--obeyed because he felt that she was without fear, and
because she had the firm but gentle hand that does not fret a horse yet
does not let him think for an instant that he is or can be free. Then,
too, he had his share of the universal, fundamental vanity we should
probably find swelling the oyster did we but know how to interpret it;
and he must have appreciated what an altogether harmonious spectacle it
was when he swept along with his mistress upon his back as light and
free as a Valkyr.

"I was sorry to miss the ride," Pauline went on after another pause--to
her, riding was the keenest of the many physical delights that are for
those who have vigorous and courageous bodies and sensitive nerves.
Whenever it was possible she fought out her battles with herself on
horseback, usually finding herself able there to drown mental distress
in the surge of physical exultation.

As he still did not speak she looked at him--and could not look away.
She had not seen that expression since their final hour together at
Battle Field, though in these few last months she had been remembering
it so exactly, had been wondering, doubting whether she could not bring
it to his face again, had been forbidding herself to long to see it.
And there it was, unchanged like all the inflexible purposes that made
his character and his career. And back to her came, as it had come
many and many a time in those years, the story he had told her of his
father and mother, of his father's love for his mother--how it had
enfolded her from the harshness and peril of pioneer life, had enfolded
her in age no less than in youth, had gone down into and through the
Valley of the Shadow with her, had not left her even at the gates of
Death, but had taken him on with her into the Beyond. And Pauline
trembled, an enormous joy thrilling through and through her.

"Don't!" she said uncertainly. "Don't look at me like that, PLEASE!"

"You were crying," he said abruptly. He stood be