drawling
with consummate impudence, "that the record of past performances are
all against your finishing the distance without coming a cropper in
these international matrimonial hurdles. Just what is your opinion,
Archibald?"

Wickersham had never liked Miriam Burrell. Now he smiled a trifle
wryly into her insolently uptilted face, without attempting to answer
the question. And during the next dance with Barbara he unburdened
himself, rather positively for him, of his distaste for her. The
pronounced frown, however, remained even longer upon his countenance.

But that one moment had served where everything else might have failed.
For the rest of the evening Barbara was again a creature of moods so
frothy, so evanescent that she swept aside even Wickersham's habit of
precision. And if the spur that brightened her eyes and quickened her
laughter was, after all, nothing more nor less than a hot contempt for
herself--for the stolen moment in the hedge-gap and the inexplicable
impulse upon which she had all but acted following it--her merriment
was none the less a palpitant thing.

And yet afterward, alone in her room, when the last treble note had
died away and she had dismissed Cecile, her sleepy-eyed maid, the sense
of oppression had returned redoubled. She did not want to sleep; she
was glad of her wide-eyed wakefulness, but in the darkness walls and
ceiling and floor seemed fairly to close in upon her and hedge in soul
and brain as well as body. It was the first time the girl had ever
known the need--the driving desire--to be alone out of doors, where
there was nothing but sky and skyline to bound her thoughts. And at
last, when her restlessness became no longer bearable, while the
remainder of the house still slept behind drawn curtains, she rose and
slipped into boots and breeches and riding coat, and descended to order
a not too wide-awake groom to saddle a horse. And in the very middle
of his sensational report of Ragtime's empty stall she swung to the
saddle and turned toward the north.

She rode hard at first. She put the small roan mare between her knees
to a pounding gallop, pulling to a walk only after the rushing air had
whipped back into her cheeks a part at least of the glow which the
sleepless night had robbed from them. And if the tang of the trees and
the solitude and the warmth of the sun did their work slowly, they
nevertheless did it well. Little by little her tense body relaxed; the