so
ably managed in her imagination an instant before, and somehow that
graciously kind greeting of hers was lost completely through the
perversity of an utterly different mood. She waited, eyes gleefully
bright, until he was almost opposite her before she coughed, ever so
faintly. Then she tilted her nose aloft in enchanting mimicry of his
lean and forward-thrust face.

"We never speak," she confided dolefully to the empty air in front of
her, "we never speak as we pass by." He whirled. So swiftly that it
took her breath he was out of the saddle and across the road, and
standing knee-deep in the undergrowth beside her. Only his profile had
been visible to her at first. Now the white line of his jaw and the
light in the eyes that searched her face chilled her, even while they
sent the blood singing in every vein. Only a few hours before she had
seen that same cold fear in Miriam Burrell's eyes; and yet not the
same, either, for hers had been a panic of lost hope, and the gleam in
the man's eyes was already only partly dread of disaster and partly a
great and unmistakable glow of thankfulness. Barbara remembered then,
with a twinge of guilt, that she could have forgotten it so completely,
the black-robed figure that had gone thundering off on the same mount
which Stephen O'Mara was riding now. She half lifted both hands to
him, apprehensively.

"You aren't going to tell me, are you," she asked, "that anything
dreadful has happened to Garry?"

Dumbly, but most reassuringly, Steve shook his head. From the top of
her hatless, wind-tossed, brown-crowned head to the tips of the
absurdly small boots tucked up beneath her, he scanned her slim body.
Barbara realized that he was trying to speak and finding the effort
hard. Slowly he removed his hat and passed one hand across his
forehead.

"Man," he ejaculated fervidly to himself, "but that's the longest
hundred yards you've ever traveled, on foot or a-horseback!" And
abruptly, accusingly, to her: "Do you know that I've been months and
years and ages rounding that bend to--to find you a little crumpled-up
heap in the road?"

After all, her unaccountably high spirits may have been only the
natural reaction from the hours of depression through which she had
lately passed. But whatever the reason behind it, Barbara's levity was
a totally spontaneous, deliciously colored thing. She sat and tilted
her head at him in audacious provocation; she assumed as chastened