“That is too deep a subject to discuss here, but if you will permit me, I will take it up with you at the house,” he quietly returned, and there was a dogged compulsion in his tone.
“I shall be highly interested in the defence,” accepted Gail, with an aggravating smile.
There seemed to be but very little to say after that, and they walked silently up the hill together towards the yellow camp fire, fuming inwardly at each other. Near the top of the hill, her ermine scarf came loose at the throat, and, with her numbed hands, she could not locate the little clasp with which it had been held.
“May I help you?” offered the rector, constraining himself to politeness.
“Thank you.” She was extremely sweet about it, and he reached up to perform the courtesy. The rounded column of her neck was white as marble in the moonlight, and, as he sought the clasps, his fingers, drawn from his woollen gloves, touched her warm throat, and they tingled. He started as if he had received an electric shock, and, as he looked into her eyes, a purple mist seemed to spring between them. He mechanically fastened the clasps, though his fingers trembled. “Thank you,” again said Gail, and he did not notice that her voice was unusually low. She went on over to the group gathered around the fire, but the Reverend Smith Boyd stood where she had left him, staring stupidly at the ground. He was in a whirl of bewilderment, amid which there was some unreasoning resentment, but beneath it all there was an inexplicable sadness.
“Just in time for the Palisade Special, Gail,” called Lucile Teasdale.
“I don’t know,” laughed Gail. “I think of going on a private car this trip,” and she sought among the group for distraction from certain oppressive thought. Allison, and Lucile and Ted and Arly, were among the more familiar figures; besides were a cherub-cheeked young lady in a bear skin, to whom Ted Teasdale was pretending to pay assiduous attention; and the thoughtful Willis Cunningham; and Houston Van Ploon, who was a ruddy-faced young fellow with an English moustache, and a perpetual air of having just come from his tailor’s; and a startling Adonis, with pink cheeks and a shining black goatee and a curly moustache, and large, round, black eyes, which were deep, and full of almost anything one might wish to put into them. This astoundingly fascinating gentleman had been proudly introduced as Dick Rodley, by Arlene, early in the evening, with an air which plainly stated that he was a personal discovery for which she gave herself great credit. At present, however, he was warming the slender white hands of Lucile Teasdale. Now he sprang up and came towards Gail.
“The Palisade Special will not start without Miss Sargent,” he declared, bending upon her an ardent gaze, and bestowing upon her a smile which displayed a flash of perfect white teeth.
Gail breathlessly thought him the most dangerously handsome thing she had ever seen, but she missed the foreign accent in him. That would have made him complete.
“I’m sorry that the Palisade Special will be delayed,” she coolly told him, but she tempered the deliberateness of that decision with an upward and sidelong glance, which she was startled to recognise in herself as distinct coquetry. She concluded, however, on reflection, that this was only a just meed which no one could withhold from this resplendent creature.