“What are you doing?” Chris demanded.
“I’m going to ride Dolly in.”
“No, you’re not,” he announced. “It would be bad discipline. After what has happened I am simply compelled to ride her in myself.”
But it was a very weak and very sick mare he rode, stumbling and halting, afflicted with nervous jerks and recurring muscular spasms—the aftermath of the tremendous orgasm through which she had passed.
“I feel like a book of verse and a hammock, after all that has happened,” Lute said, as they rode into camp.
It was a summer camp of city-tired people, pitched in a grove of towering redwoods through whose lofty boughs the sunshine trickled down, broken and subdued to soft light and cool shadow. Apart from the main camp were the kitchen and the servants’ tents; and midway between was the great dining hall, walled by the living redwood columns, where fresh whispers of air were always to be found, and where no canopy was needed to keep the sun away.
“Poor Dolly, she is really sick,” Lute said that evening, when they had returned from a last look at the mare. “But you weren’t hurt, Chris, and that’s enough for one small woman to be thankful for. I thought I knew, but I really did not know till to-day, how much you meant to me. I could hear only the plunging and struggle in the thicket. I could not see you, nor know how it went with you.”
“My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.
She turned her face up to his and met his lips.
“Good night,” she said.