“It will soothe him, I should say. Only a faint sound of it can be heard in his room. He seemed to fall asleep just as I left.”
“Did you tell him,” she asked, with flushed cheeks and lowered lashes, while her fingers strayed over the strings without striking them, “how very, very sorry I am for my thoughtless folly?”
“You are too hard upon yourself,” he said, taking a seat near her, and drinking in every detail of the charming picture before him, “and to ease your mind I will make a confession. My friend and I—or, at least, I can answer for myself—were prompted by impertinent curiosity when we entered your grounds. It was not by accident that we strayed into them, but of malice prepense. The fact is, we are both devoted to horseflesh, and as we rambled about, smoking, in a wood by the wayside, you flashed past us on your black horse, and took a jump which seemed almost impossible. In our admiration and delight, we forgot the rules which hold good with regard to our neighbor’s landmark, and scrambling up the bank and over the wall, and down the bank again, we forced our way through the trees and sighted you again. Your horse was rearing and plunging; by the half light at that distance it seemed as though he had got the bit well between his teeth, and was running away with you, and your scream strengthened that impression. Then came our unlucky interference, and its deplorable result.”
“Did you think that jump impossible?” she asked, turning wide-open eyes upon him. “Zephyr and I often take it. Zephyr can jump almost anything. He goes out of his way to find jumps, and he is never happier than when he finds something that looks difficult.”
“Aren’t your people afraid lest some accident should befall you when you ride about the park unattended?”
“My people?”
She looked at him in surprise as she spoke, and then in some confusion struck several chords lightly on the harp.
“My father is a great deal away,” she said, in a somewhat constrained tone; “and of course, I do not make mamma nervous by telling her the pranks Zephyr and I enjoy together.”
“You are fond of riding?”
“Fond of it!” she repeated, slowly, while her face lit up with sudden enthusiasm; “I could not live without it. After a certain number of hours have passed in the house, my foot seems to tingle to be in the stirrup again, and my fingers burn to take hold of the reins. Whatever the weather it is the same; I want to be away and outside and in it! If I hear the wind wailing and sighing in the trees round the house, I long to feel it whirling round me, blowing sad thoughts away; and even when a thunderstorm is at its height, it seems to draw me like a magnet. I want to be part of the storm, drenched with the rain, wrapped round with the lightning, horse and I both stirred to the last touch of quivering excitement, driven along, with the thunder rumbling and crashing behind us! Then I feel alive and happy—so happy that I can rise in my saddle and scream like a child from sheer delight!”