am was right; you
were shy. He had known you to go miles around, on occasion, to avoid a
town, just to escape meeting a woman. And he told us--of course I can
repeat it since it is so ridiculously untrue--that it was easier to bridle
a trapped moose than to lead you to a ballroom; but that once there, no
doubt you would gentle fine."

She leaned back in her seat, laughing softly, though it was obviously a
joke at her own expense as well as Tisdale's. "And I believed it," she
added. "I believed it--every word."

Tisdale laughed too, a deep undernote. "That sounds like Billy Foster. I
wager it was Foster. Was it?" he asked.

She nodded affirmatively.

"Then Foster has met you." Tisdale's voice rang a little. "He knows you,
after all."

"Yes, he could hardly help knowing me. His business interests are with my
closest friends, the Morgansteins; they think a great deal of him. And he
happens to play a remarkably good hand at bridge; we always depend on him
to make up a table when he is in town."

Tisdale's eyes rested a thoughtful moment on the road ahead. Strange
Foster never had mentioned her. But that showed how blind, how completely
infatuated with the Spanish woman the boy was. His face set austerely.
Then suddenly he started; his grasp tightened on the reins so that the
colts sprang to the sharp grade. "Do you happen to know that enchantress,
too?" he asked.

"Whom?" questioned Miss Armitage.

"I mean Mrs. Weatherbee. I believe she counts the Morgansteins among her
friends, and you said you were staying at Vivian Court, where her
apartments are."

"Oh, yes, I know--her. I"--the color flamed and went in her face; her
glance fell once more to the steep slope, searching out the narrowing
stream through the trees. "I--'ve known Beatriz Weatherbee all my life.
I--I think a great deal of her."

"Madam, madam!" Tisdale protested, "don't tell me that. You have known
her, lived near her, perhaps, in California, those years when you were
growing up; shared the intimacies young girls enjoy. I understand all
that, but don't say you care anything for her now."

Miss Armitage lifted her face. Her eyes did not sparkle then; they flamed.
"Why shouldn't I, Mr. Tisdale? And who are you to disparage Beatriz
Weatherbee? You never have known her. What right have you to condemn her?"

"This right, Miss Armitage; she destroyed David Weatherbee. And I know
what a life was lost, what a man was sacrificed."

CHAPTER VII