"Is it 'yes'?" he demanded, with a passionate pressure of his hand, and a great light burning in his eyes. "Mine! Mine! For—as long as we live?"
The girl still made no verbal reply, but she bowed her head and gently raised his hand, and tenderly pressed it to her soft bosom. In an instant she lay crushed in his arms while the two horses, with heads together, seemed lost in a friendly discussion of the extraordinary proceedings going on between their riders.
What they thought about them was apparently on the whole favorable, for presently, with mute expressions of good will, their handsome heads drew apart and lowered significantly. The next moment they were enjoying a pleasant siesta, such as only a four-footed creature can accomplish standing without risk to life and limb.
Half an hour later they were wide awake and full of bustling activity. The closed heels on their saddle cinchas warned them that even lovers' madness has its limits of duration, and that the practical affairs of life must inevitably become paramount in the end.
So they answered the call, and raced down the trail in the cool of the night.
CHAPTER XXIII
IN NEW YORK
Mrs. James Carbhoy had endured anything but a happy time for several weeks. She had received no news from her beloved son; her husband had spirited himself away on business and left her without a word of definite information as to his whereabouts; while even the trying presence of her young daughter was denied her, since she had been forced to dispatch that personification of childish willfulness to their estate at Tuxedo, that she might be put through a course of disciplining by her various governesses.
She was alone, she reminded herself not less than three times a day, and to be alone in her great mansion at Central Park was the limit of earthly punishment as she understood it. She detested it. She hated the hot summer landscape of the park; she was worried to death by the chorus of automobile hooters as the cars sped up and down the great asphalt way; she felt that the red-and-white stone palaces with which she was surrounded were the ugliest things ever hidden from blind eyes, and an army of servants could be, and was, the most nerve-racking thing she had ever been called upon to endure. For two peas she would pack a bag—no, her maid would have to pack it; she was denied even that pleasure—and hie herself to Europe.