"I might say something about asking questions," began Cosme with grimness, but changed his tone quickly with a light, apologetic touch on her arm, "but—but I won't. I ran away from school when I was fourteen and I've been knocking around the West ever since."
"What school?" asked Sheila.
He did not answer for several minutes. They had come to the end of the meadow and were mounting a slope on a narrow trail where the ponies seemed to nose their way among the trees. Now and then Sheila had to put out her hand to push her knee away from a threatening trunk. Below were the vivid paintbrush flowers and the blue mountain lupine and all about the nymph-white aspens with leaves turning to restless gold against the sky. The horses moved quietly with a slight creaking of saddles. There was a feeling of stealth, of mystery—that tiptoe breathless expectation of Pan pipes…. At last Cosme turned in his saddle, rested his hand on the cantle, and looked at Sheila from a bent face with troubled eyes.
"It was an Eastern school," he said. "No doubt you've heard of it. It was Groton."
The name here in these Wyoming woods brought a picture as foreign as the artificiality of a drawing-room.
"Groton? You ran away?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Sheila's suspicions were returning forcibly. "I'll have to ask questions, Mr. Hilliard, because it seems so strange—what you are now, and your running away and never having been brought back to the East by—by whoever it was that sent you to Groton."
"I want you to ask questions," he said rather wistfully. "You have the right."
This forced her into something of a dilemma. She ignored it and waited, looking away from him. He would not leave her this loophole, however.