Probably she considered that the time had come to start “punishing” him, for, once in the park, she literally ran away from him along the East Path which so far he had traveled alone. But Polkadot, asserting his indignation in none too subtle snorts, soon overhauled the rented horse, then showed his equine etiquette by settling to a companionable walk. His man, too, after one look into the flushed, exultant, impish face beneath the cloud of wind-tossed curls, forgave.
“The trouble with you, W. W., is simply this,” he propounded, referring to her late allegation in superior vein.
“W. W.’? Explanation!” she demanded.
Attempting a look of polite surprise, he obliged. “Inclusive for ‘Wicked Wife’ and ‘Wiley Wirgin.’ I am here to say that, as your sex is run nowadays, it is hard to tell which are which. In this woman’s town none of ’em seem to want to wear the marriage brand. Many a Mrs. calls herself Miss. You keep too close to your mother, likely, to be yoked without her knowing it. But how could an outsider know, for instance, whether or not your cousin, Miss Lauderdale——”
“Jane married? What an idea!” As expected, Irene interrupted on getting the general drift of his remarks. “Not but what she’s plenty old enough. She’s twenty-six—think of it! Maybe I oughtn’t to tell her age. Still, any one can see it on her face, don’t you think so—or do you? And it isn’t as though you were interested in her instead of me. Jane is considered still very attractive, though. A good many men have admired her even since my day and degeneration. Do you know, I never can resist adding that ‘degeneration’ to ‘my day’! It’s trite, I know, but it’s true—too-trite-true. Jane has a whole raft of women friends. She’s always off visiting them. She is down at Hempstead Plains now with one of them.”
Pape rose in his stirrups, as it turned out, merely to hold back a low-hung bough which had threatened to brush the girl’s artfully tousled locks.
“Fortunately,” she babbled on, “Mills Harford still wants to marry her. Mother and I both think she ought to snap him up. Don’t you? Harfy has money and he isn’t bad looking, although I myself shouldn’t consider him as a suitor. I guess he knows that.” She transferred her glance from him to the path ahead. “Here’s the longest straight-away in Central Park,” she cried. “I don’t want to leave you again—better come along!”
Bombed again! Pape pressed one hand against his brow as he shook Dot’s rein, a signal to follow the spurt to which Irene had put the academy mare. He wasn’t given to headaches from any pace of his horse, but a sudden hurting sensation had shot through his brain.
Jane Lauderdale wasn’t, then, married so far as her relatives knew. And she was covering her whereabouts from them as she had tried to cover from him. By no tax of the imagination could he think of the peeling old brick house on East Sixty-third Street as the “place” of any of those elite “women friends” mentioned; yet even could he do so, why one with a husband or other male attaché who would wait and kiss their fair guest at the door?
Incidentally, Polkadot won the brush over this tangent, coming up from the rear at an “I’ll-show-you” pace. Willingly enough he waited for the black mare where the bridle path again became winding.