se stumbled, and she pulled in and bent low
over her saddle, and said, as if he had really spoken:

"I can't understand----"

Her outline was blurred, but her face was like a light in that shadowed
valley. He didn't speak until they were up the hill and the wind had
caught them.

"What?" he asked then.

Was it the glow, offered by the white earth rather than the sky, that
made him fancy her lips quivered?

"Why you always try to hurt me."

He thought of her broken riding crop, of her attempts to hurt him every
time he had seen her since the day she had tried to cut him with it. A
single exception clung to his memory--the night of Betty's dance, years
ago, when she had failed to remember him. Her words, therefore, carried
a thrill, a colour of surrender, since from the very first she had made
him attack for his own defence.

"That's an odd thing for you to say."

There were lights ahead, accents in the closing night for Blodgett's
huge and ugly extravagance. They rode slowly up the drive.

"Will you ever stop following me? Will you ever leave me alone?"

He stared at her, answering softly:

"It is impossible I should ever leave you alone."

At the terrace he sprang down, tossed his reins to a groom, and went to
her, raising his hands. For a moment she looked at him, hesitating.
There were two grooms. So she took his hands and leapt down. It was a
quick, uncertain touch her fingers gave him.

"Thanks," she said, and crossed the terrace at his side.

That moment, he reflected, was in itself culminating, yet he couldn't
dismiss the feeling that their relations approached a larger climax. All
the better, since things couldn't very well go on as they were. Was it
that fleeting contact that had altered him, or her companionship in the
gray night? He only knew as he walked close to her that the bitterness
in his heart had diminished. He was willing to relinquish the return
blow if she would ease the hurt she had given him. He told himself that
she had never been nearer. An odd fancy!

The others rode up as they reached the door, and the hall was noisy with
people just returned from the pond, so that their solitude was
destroyed. While he bathed and dressed he tried to understand just what
had happened. The alteration in his own heart could only be accounted
for by a change in hers. Perhaps his mood was determined by her
unexpected wonder that he should always try to hurt. He couldn't drive
from his mind the d