He shook his head, and asked, “Are you doing anything this afternoon?”
“Haven’t thought about anything,” she answered. “And now I suppose I can’t plan upon you with Mr. Winters to be told all about fish.”
“But you can,” Dick assured her. “I’m turning him over to Mr. Hanley, who’s got the trout counted down to the last egg hatched and who knows all the grandfather bass by name. I’ll tell you what—” He paused and considered. Then his face lighted as with a sudden idea. “It’s a loafing afternoon. Let’s take the rifles and go potting squirrels. I noticed the other day they’ve become populous on that hill above the Little Meadow.”
But he had not failed to observe the flutter of alarm that shadowed her eyes so swiftly, and that so swiftly was gone as she clapped her hands and was herself.
“But don’t take a rifle for me,” she said.
“If you’d rather not—” he began gently.
“Oh, I want to go, but I don’t feel up to shooting. I’ll take Le Gallienne’s last book along—it just came in—and read to you in betweenwhiles. Remember, the last time I did that when we went squirreling it was his ‘Quest of the Golden Girl’ I read to you.”
Chapter XXV
Paula on the Fawn, and Dick on the Outlaw, rode out from the Big House as nearly side by side as the Outlaw’s wicked perversity permitted. The conversation she permitted was fragmentary. With tiny ears laid back and teeth exposed, she would attempt to evade Dick’s restraint of rein and spur and win to a bite of Paula’s leg or the Fawn’s sleek flank, and with every defeat the pink flushed and faded in the whites of her eyes. Her restless head-tossing and pitching attempts to rear (thwarted by the martingale) never ceased, save when she pranced and sidled and tried to whirl.
“This is the last year of her,” Dick announced. “She’s indomitable. I’ve worked two years on her without the slightest improvement. She knows me, knows my ways, knows I am her master, knows when she has to give in, but is never satisfied. She nourishes the perennial hope that some time she’ll catch me napping, and for fear she’ll miss that time she never lets any time go by.”