"But even the handkerchief doesn't tell us anything," said Barbara, spreading it out, "except that some woman visitor has ridden here within a few days and played drop the handkerchief with herself or somebody else to us unknown."
"She may have been a scarlet fever patient from Ardsley; you'd better have a care!" And Griswold's tone was bitter.
"I'm not afraid; and as I have never been so near Ardsley before, I should like to ride in and steal a glimpse. There's little danger of meeting the lord of the manor, I suppose, or any of his guests at this hour, and we need not go near the house."
He saw that she was really curious, and it was not in his heart to refuse her, so they followed the bridle-path through the cool forest, and came in due course to the clearing where Jerry had first confessed herself lost, and thereafter had suffered the captured outlaw to point her the way home.
"The timber has been cut here since my last visit, but I remember the bridle-paths very well. They all reach the highroad of the estate ultimately. We may safely take this one, which has been the most used and which climbs a hill that gives a fine outlook."
The path he chose had really been beaten into better condition than either of the others, and they rode side by side now. A deer feeding on a grassy slope raised its head and stared at them, and a fox scampered wildly before them. It seemed that they were shut in from all the world, these two, who but a few days before had never seen each other, and it was a relief to him to find that she threw off her troubles and became more animated and cheerful than he had yet seen her. His comments on her mount, which was sorry enough, were amusing; and she paused now and then to peer into the tops of the tallest trees, under the pretense that Appleweight had probably reverted to the primordial and might be found at any minute in one of the branches above them. Her dark green habit, and the soft hat to match, with its little feather thrust into the side, spoke for real usage; and the gauntleted hand that swung lightly at her side inadvertently brushed his own once—and he knew that this must not happen again! When their eyes met it was with frank confidence on her part, and it seemed to him that they were very old friends, and that they had been riding through this forest, or one identical with it, since the world began. It is thus that a man with any imagination feels first about a woman who begins to interest him—that there was never any beginning to their acquaintance that can be reckoned as time and experience are measured, but that he has known her for countless years; and if there be a poetic vein in him, he will indulge in such fancies as that he has seen her as a priestess of Aphrodite in the long ago, dreaming upon the temple steps; or that he has watched her skipping pebbles upon the violet storied sea against a hazy background of cities long crumbled into dust. Such fancies as these are a part of love's gentle madness, and luckier than she knows is the girl who awakens in a lover this eager idealization. If he can turn a verse for her in which she is added to the sacred Nine, personifying all sweet, gentle and gracious things, so much the better.
Just what he, on the other hand, may mean to her; just what form of deification he evokes in her, he can never know; for the women who write of such matters have never been those who are sincere or worth heeding, and they never will be, so long as woman's heart remains what it has been from the beginning—far-hidden, and filled with incommunicable secret beliefs and longings, and tremulous with fears that are beyond man's power to understand.
Griswold had missed the white rose that he had begun to associate with Barbara, and he grew suddenly daring and spoke of it.
"You haven't your rose to-day."
"Oh, I'm beyond the source of supply! I have a young friend, a girl, who makes her living as a florist—not a purely commercial enterprise, for she experiments and develops new varieties, and is quite wonderful; and that white rose is her own creation—it is becoming well known. She named it for me, and she sends me at least one every day—she says it's my royalty—if that's what you lawyers call that sort of thing."