"My dear, I dare not sit out after sunset, so subject as I am to bronchitis."
"No, no, of course not—I forgot your bronchitis. This is the time for you to be out—and this air will soon make another man of you, dear. Isn't it a heavenly climate? Isn't it divine, this sun? Look here, Claud, we've got some capital horses—or we had; I'll ask Jim. What do you say to a ride—a long, lovely bush ride, like the old rides we used to have together?"
Words cannot describe the pang that went through her when he shook his head indifferently, and said he was too old for such violent exercise now.
"Stuff!" she cried angrily.—
"Besides, I haven't been on a horse for so long that I shouldn't know how to sit him," he teased her lazily. "You wouldn't like to see me tumble off at your hall door, before the servants, would you?"
"Oh, Claud! And to think how you used to ride!"
But of course she knew this was a joke, and laughed it off.
"It's nothing but sheer indolence," said she, patting the hand on her arm—that shapely ivory hand, with its polished filbert nails—"and I see that my mission in life is to cure you of it. Come, we will make a start with a real country walk."
She began to drag him away from the bowered homestead, but he planted his feet, and took his hand from her arm.
"Not now, Debbie," he objected gently, but with that subtle note of mastership that had struck so sharply into Jim's sensitiveness; "it is mail-day, and the letters will be at the house by this time."