"I've been trying the most ambitious horse I ever saw," said Blythe, very much the wholesome, out-of-doors looking man, dropping into a chair. "If I buy him—and I'm going to think that over carefully—I think I shall call him The Climber. He was very keen to accompany me up in the elevator, but the man on guard at the door wouldn't have it. Would you have minded my fetching him up, Laura? He has the true artistic sense, too. He tried all he knew to climb that statue of Bobbie Burns in the Park. Wouldn't it have been a victory for Art if he had succeeded in demolishing that bronze libel on Burns? Then he wanted to walk—prance, I mean—into the car of some people I stopped to pass the time of day with. Curious psychological study, that horse. I can't imagine where he acquired his mounting social ambition, for he's about one-half wild horse of the pampas and the other half Wyoming cayuse."
"Louise," suggested Laura, who had been meditating during Blythe's raillery, "would you care for a ride now?" Blythe's eyes lighted up at the words. "I must have some excuse, you see, for driving the two of you away, for my dressmaker is moaning piteously over the 'phone for me to try some things on, and I'll have to go. Scamp has been eating his head off for a fortnight, but he'll behave, I'm sure. And my habit, boots, everything, will fit you perfectly."
Before Laura had finished Blythe was at the telephone, directing Laura's stableman to send Scamp around and Laura was guiding Louise to her dressing room to put her into the hands of her maid for the change into Laura's riding things. Half an hour later Louise, well-mounted on the breedy-looking, over-rested but tractable enough Scamp, was on the Park bridle-path alongside Blythe, who rode the mettlesome cob he had maligned with the stigma of cayuse.
The two horses, adaptable striders, trotted teamwise for a while, Louise and Blythe silently giving themselves over to the enjoyment of the eager, tingling air and the brilliant sunshine. They reined up to cross the carriage road and for a while after that, by a sort of tacit understanding, they reduced their horses' pace to a brisk walk.
It is a bromidic truism, but it is none the less true, that it is only possible for a woman to be wholly at her ease in the presence of the man in whom she is not "interested." Louise, as she rode at Blythe's side through the bright vistas of bare, interlacing branches, perhaps would have shrunk from being judged by the mildly accusatory terms of such an axiom; nevertheless, alone with this man, she was wonderingly conscious of being possessed by a speech-cancelling diffidence, a restraint not so much superimposed as involuntarily felt, that was wholly unusual with her in the presence of anyone else. She caught herself, not without flushing when she became aware of her own purpose, in the act of permitting her horse to drop a pace behind in order that she might be free to glance at Blythe's rugged profile and the shapeliness of his head for an instant; for she was beginning to discover that it was oddly difficult for her to meet his frank, direct, generally cheerful gaze. This was, of course, from no lack of candor, but, on the contrary, because she was beginning to fear betrayal through her excessive natural candor. It would have been impossible for her to name any other human being with whom she would have preferred to be riding through the sunny Park on this afternoon; yet this knowledge did not efface the other fact that she was not at her ease with him. She endeavored, in vaguely wondering about this, to assure herself that it was because of certain revelations which she intended to make to Blythe concerning happenings to herself since last she had seen him; but her inner frankness informed her that she was merely searching for a pretext for her slightly provoking diffidence.
Blythe was the first to break the silence.
"'On a hazy, brilliant afternoon in February, 1754, a solitary horseman might have been seen—'" he began to quote, smiling, in a sing-song way, as from the inevitable beginning of an antique novel. Louise laughed.
"Do you feel so lonesome as all that?" she asked him.
"Not precisely lonesome," said Blythe, "but—well, a little detached from the picture. Speaking of pictures, please try and steady yourself in the saddle for a moment while I say something pretty. I have been mentally browsing for a word to describe your profile. Now I have it. It is 'intaglio.' The beauty of that word is that I almost think I know what it means; and also it fits. The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse. I think that is the first compliment I ever made in my life," and his reddening features testified to the truth of it.
"Then I shall not deny that it pleases me," replied Louise, able now to turn her head and look at him without the unwonted stealthiness which had been puzzling her. "It is what numismatists would call a 'first-minted' compliment, is it not?"