"Not out here, but inside—in the drawing room—you've got me at a disadvantage. I'm new to soft speeches, low lights, and the way you Eastern women dress. There's too much glamor. I never know whether you mean what you say or whether it's all just a game—and I'm It."
She threw back her head and laughed with a full throat.
"You dear, delicious, impossible creature! Don't you know that the world is a tangle of illusions, and that you and I and everybody else were made to help keep them tangled? Nobody ever means what he says. Half of the joy in life consists in making people think you different from what you are."
"Which are you? The kid on the horse or the woman—back there—last night?"
"Do you think I'll tell you?"
"No, I suppose not. And it wouldn't help me much if you're going to lie about it—I mean," he corrected, "if you're trying to keep me guessing."
"My poor, deluded friend, you wouldn't believe me if I told you. So what's the use. For the present," she added defiantly, "I'm the kid on the horse."
"And I guess I'm It, all right," he laughed.
As they approached Chelten Hills they made out at the cross-roads a number of figures on horseback. The sun, a pale madder ball, had suddenly sprung from behind the hills and painted with its rosy hues the streaks of mist which hung in the valleys below them. As its shadows deepened and its glow turned from pink to orange, the figures at the cross-roads stood out in silhouette against the frosty meadows beyond. There were three women and at least a dozen men, most of them wearing the club colors, which took on added brilliancy as the sun emerged from behind the distant hills. A cloud of vapor rose from the flanks of the horses. There was much "hallo-ing" and waving of riding crops as the Huntsman and his hounds rode into their midst and the two parties met. A brief consultation, and the hounds were sent down a narrow lane and across a wooden bridge toward a patch of woods which darkened the hillside half a mile away.
"We'll draw that cover first," said Curtis Janney. "Perhaps we can coax the old Chelten Fox to come out to-day." It was the name they had given to an old quarry of theirs, the elusive victor in half a dozen runs in the last few years.