She looked up, and said in French 'I beg your pardon. Something has come undone. Can you help me?'
Her voice was delicious, cool and smooth as ivory. His heart pounded. He vaguely bowed, and murmured, 'I should be delighted.'
She stood aside a little, and he took her place. He bent over the strap that was loose, and bit his lips, and cursed his embarrassments. 'Come, I mustn't let her think me quite an ass.' He was astonished at himself. That he should still be capable of so strenuous a sensation! 'And I had thought I was blasé!' He was intensely conscious of the silence, of the solitude and dimness of the forest, and of their isolation there, so near to each other, that superb pale woman and himself. But his eyes were bent on the misbehaving strap, which he held helplessly between his fingers.
At last he looked up at her. 'How warm and beautiful and fragrant she is,' he thought. 'With her white face, with her dark eyes, with those red lips and that splendid figure—what an heroic looking woman!'
'This is altogether disgraceful,' he said, 'and I assure you I'm covered with confusion. But I won't dissemble. I haven't the remotest notion what needs to be done. I'm afraid this is the first time in my life I have ever touched anything belonging to a horse.'
He said it with a pathetic drawl, and she laughed.—'And yet you're English.'
'Oh, I dare say I'm English enough. Though I don't see how you knew it. Don't tell me you knew it from my accent.'
'Oh, non pas,' she hastened to protest. 'But you're the new owner of Saint-Graal. Everybody of the country knows, of course, that the new owner of Saint-Graal, Mr. Warringwood, is English.'
'Ah, then she's of the country,' was Paul's mental note.
'And I thought all Englishmen were horsemen,' she went on.