"'Cause why?" she cooed, and stooping, kissed him with warm, careless affection. "You always ask me about my eyes when you want me to kiss you. Of course, when you want to kiss me, why, you just come and take 'em."
"My esteemed privilege, sweetheart. I am your caballero."
"Did Aunty Eleanor?" said Louise.
But Walter Stone rose and straightened his shoulders. "That will do, mouse. I can't have any jealousy between my sweethearts."
"Never! And, Uncle Walter, do you want to ride Major or Rally? Rally and Boyar get along better together. I'll saddle Boy in a jiffy."
To ride some ten miles in the blazing sun of midsummer requires a kind of anticipatory fortitude, at fifty, especially when one's own vine and fig tree is cool and fragrant, embowered in blue flowers and graced by, let us say, Louise. And a cigar is always at its best when half-smoked. But when Louise came blithely leading the two saddle-ponies, Black Boyar and the big pinto Rally, Walter Stone shook an odd twenty years from his broad shoulders and swung into the saddle briskly.
From the shade of the great sycamore warders of the wide gate, he waved a gauntleted salute to Aunt Eleanor, who stood on the porch, drawing a leaf of the graceful moon-vine through her slender fingers. She nodded a smiling farewell.
Louise and her uncle rode as two lovers, their ponies close together. The girl swayed to Boyar's quick, swinging walk. Walter Stone sat the strong, tireless Rally with solid ease.
The girl, laughing happily at her triumph, leaned toward her escort teasingly, singing fragments of old Spanish love-songs, or talking with eager lips and sparkling eyes. Of a sudden she would assume a demureness, utterly bewitching in its veiled and perfect mimicry. Quite seriously he would set about to overcome this delightful mood of hers with extravagant vows of lifelong love and servitude, as though he were in truth her chosen caballero and she his Señorita of the Rose.