“Why, Dick,” she interrupted him, fired by a new thought, “if I loved Evan as madly as you think, you would mean so little that I’d be content, if it were the only way out, for you to have a hunting accident. But you see, I don’t. Anyway, there’s a brass tack for you to ponder.”
She made another reluctant step away, then called back in a whisper, her face over her shoulder:
“Red Cloud, I’m dreadfully sorry.... And through it all I’m so glad that you do still love me.”
Before Blake returned, Dick found time to study his face in the glass. Printed there was the expression that had startled his company the preceding evening. It had come to stay. Oh, well, was his thought, one cannot chew his heart between his teeth without leaving some sign of it.
He strolled out on the sleeping porch and looked at Paula’s picture under the barometers. He turned it to the wall, and sat on the bed and regarded the blankness for a space. Then he turned it back again.
“Poor little kid,” he murmured, “having a hard time of it just waking up at this late day.”
But as he continued to gaze, abruptly there leaped before his eyes the vision of her in the moonlight, clinging to Graham and drawing his lips down to hers.
Dick got up quickly, with a shake of head to shake the vision from his eyes.
By half past nine his correspondence was finished and his desk cleaned save for certain data to be used in his talks with his Shorthorn and Shire managers. He was over at the window and waving a smiling farewell to Lute and Ernestine in the limousine, as Mendenhall entered. And to him, and to Manson next, Dick managed, in casual talk, to impress much of his bigger breeding plans.
“We’ve got to keep an eagle eye on the bull-get of King Polo,” he told Manson. “There’s all the promise in the world for a greater than he from Bleakhouse Fawn, or Alberta Maid, or Moravia’s Nellie Signal. We missed it this year so far, but next year, or the year after, soon or late, King Polo is going to be responsible for a real humdinger of winner.”