Allison, who had followed her with admiring attention, his mind accompanying hers in eager leaps, laughed in relief. After all, she was a girl—and what a girl! The exhilaration of the drive, and of the snow beating in her face, and of the animated conversation, had set the clear skin of her face aglow with colour. Her deep red lips, exquisitely curved and half parted, displayed a row of dazzling white teeth, and the elbow which touched his was magnetic. Allison refused to believe that he was forty-five!
“You’re fond of collies,” he guessed, surprised to find himself with an eager interest in the likes and dislikes of a young girl. It was a new experience.
“I adore them!” she enthusiastically declared. “Back home, I have one of every marking but a pure white.”
There was something tender and wistful in the tone of that “back home.” No doubt she had hosts of friends and admirers there, possibly a favoured suitor. It was quite likely. A girl such as Gail Sargent could hardly escape it. If there was a favoured suitor Allison rather pitied him, for Gail was in the city of strong men. Busy with an entirely new and strange group of thoughts, Allison turned into the Park, and Gail uttered an exclamation of delight as the fresh, keen air whipped in her face. The snow was like a filmy white veil against the bare trees, and enough of it had clung, by now, to outline, with silver pointing, the lacework of branches. On the turf, still green from the open winter, it lay in thin white patches, and squirrels, clad in their sleek winter garments, were already scampering to their beds, crossing the busy drive with the adroitness of accomplished metropolitan pedestrians, their bushy tails hopping behind them in ungainly loops.
The pair in the runabout were silent, for the east drive at this hour was thronged with outward bound machines, and the roadway was slippery with the new-fallen snow. Steady of nerve, keen of eye, firm of hand! Gail watched the alert figure of Allison, tensely and yet easily motionless, in the seat beside her. The terrific swiftness of everything impressed her. Every car was going at top speed, and it seemed that she was in a constant maze of hair-breadth escapes. By and by, however, she found another and a greater marvel; that in all this breathless driving, there was no recklessness. Capability, that was the word for which she had been groping. No man could survive here, and rest his feet upon the under layer, unless he possessed superior ability, superior will, superior strength. She arrived at exactly the same phrase Allison had entertained five minutes before; “the city of strong men!” Again she turned to the man at her side for a critical inspection, in this new light. His frame was powerful, and the square, high forehead, with the bulges of concentration above the brows, showed his mental equipment to be equally as rugged. His profile was a crisply cut silhouette against the wintry grey; straight nose, full, firm lips, pointed chin, square jaw. He was a fair example of all this force.
Perhaps feeling the steady gaze, Allison turned to her suddenly, and for a moment the grey eyes and the brown ones looked questioningly into each other, then there leaped from the man to the woman a something which held her gaze a full second longer than she would have wished.
“Air’s great,” he said with a smile.
“Glorious!” she agreed. “I don’t want to go in.”
“Don’t,” he promptly advised her.
“That’s a simple enough solution,” and her laugh, in the snow-laden air, reminded him, in one of those queer flashes of memory, of a little string of sleighbells he had owned as a youngster. “However, I promised Cousin Lucile.”