let us change the subject."

CHAPTER VIII

WHEN A PRINCE WOOS

But Prince Koltsoff evidently deemed it expedient to obey the letter,
not the spirit, of the wish. An ardent lover of horses, he gave
himself wholly to them when they arrived at the stables, conversing
freely with the grooms and going over the various equines with the
hands and eyes of an expert.

When at length they strolled from the stables to a little wooded knoll
near the boundary of the estate, commanding a view of the main road,
which ran straight for a quarter of a mile and then dived into the
purple hills with their gray out-jutting rocks, the girl, who had been
left pretty much to her own thoughts, felt in ever-growing degree the
disadvantage at which she had been placed in the course of their
conversation. She had sat, it seemed, as a child at the feet of a
tutor. At least in the mood she had developed, she would have it so.
The thought did not please her. And then she began to burn with the
memory that on the veranda the Prince had placed his hand upon hers and
that for some reason beyond her knowledge, she had permitted it to
remain so until he had withdrawn it.

This sufferance, she felt, had somehow affected, at the very outset, a
degree of tacit intimacy between them which would not otherwise have
occurred in a fortnight, perhaps never. But he had done it with an
assurance almost, if not quite, hypnotic, and he had removed his
hand--a move, she recognized, which offered more opportunities for
bungling than the initial venture--with the exact degree of
insouciance, of abstraction, but at the same time not without a slight
lighting of the eyes expressive alike of humility and gratitude.
Lurking in her mind was an irritation over the position in which she
had been placed, and her only solace was the thought that her revenge
might be taken when Koltsoff tried it again, as she had no doubt he
would.

If she had analyzed her emotions she would have been obliged to face
the disagreeable truth that she, Anne Wellington, was jealous. Jealous
of a stable of horses! After all, introspection, however deep, might
not have opened her eyes as to the basic element of her mood, for
jealousy had never been among the components of her mental equipment.
At all events she was, as she would have expressed it, "peeved." Why?
Because he had held her hand--and talked to her like a school girl.

But silence, smilingly indifferent, was the only m