She looked with a hard glance straight into his eyes, her lips thinning. “Then you think more of your horse than you do of me?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he temporized.
She pressed the point. “You may think I lack reserve, Mr. Pape. Sometimes I myself feel that I am too impulsive and too—too honest.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he repeated. It was the best he could offer and he was in doubt about that.
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t,” she snapped. “But why don’t you assume a virtue if you have it not—why not be a little bit honest yourself? Why not answer the truth? Heaven knows I might better learn it now than later. Tell me, Why-Not, is it only Polkadot for whom you are deserting me?”
Pape tried unobtrusively to give the chauffeur the start signal; shifted his weight; cleared his throat.
“Well, it isn’t exactly—not entirely on account of the horse, although a man’s cayuse is his cayuse and that’s that. No, miss. You see, we were kind of late starting, owing to your change of—of habits. And I have a friend that I’m sort of committed to help because she—he——”
But his impromptu defense merged into her high-pitched scorn which, in its turn, merged into tears before she was through.
“I knew it. I divined it. And me meriting a man’s whole soul! Kindly tell the driver to start at once. As for you, Peter Stansbury Pape, I think you’re contemptible!”
Grooms were caring for the horses on Pape’s return to the stable. The “cripple” he miraculously cured by a word and a touch. In his dressing room, he hurried into street clothes.