Turning his horse to put it in motion, he did not know that she sat drooping in the saddle, and staring—pale and staring—with a horrified fear and disappointment in her eyes.
"I'll not race," she faltered. "It is so near, so don't come. Perhaps I might have guessed—that—you—were—but I just—just hoped—. Good night. I didn't see the Colonel—please say I send my love."
She was riding away, when he called desperately after her:
"Don't you want Dale to have a little of it?"
That one taunting, trembling, passionate question, hurled at her with such bitterness of feeling, such hopeless sense of despair, touched a spring which opened the doors of the heretofore inscrutable, and flooded her with light. For an instant the pike danced before her eyes as though it were a road of bejeweled splendor! She wanted to laugh, and she did laugh; and, if he had guessed the reason, she might have had to use both whip and spur in a longer race than just to Bob's gate. But he did not guess, and she did not turn her head nor slacken pace. Unhappily and sullenly he rode on to Arden.
Several days passed before they met; but in the meanwhile he had spent not a few nights sitting by that window in his darkened room, building castles and tearing them down, planning futures and destroying them; dreaming, dreaming. His attitude had become merely deferential, requiring a studied reticence upon her own part, and precluding a reference to their meeting on the road, or any mention of nobility, the sheriff, Dale or Tusk.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE MYSTIC GARDENER SHOWS HIS WORK
It was sundown about a week later when Brent came up the steps and threw himself in a chair by the Colonel's side. Jane and the faithful Mac had just left—indeed, the sound of her horse's hoofbeats might still be heard through the pulseless evening as the two men gazed in moody silence at the approaching night. The sky had taken on that deep blue velvet softness of Italian beauty, and the low, red west of the dying day might have been reflected from some funeral pyre in distant, mystic India. A murmur of drowsy birds came from the darkening trees—a few hushed, plaintive notes, wistfully calling in tones of twilight.