"Is there—anything—you wish to tell me? Anything that
I—perhaps—have a faint shadow of a right to know?"
For a long time they rode in silence, her question unanswered. A narrow cart road—less of a road than a lane—led east. He turned his horse into it.
For a moment no sound broke the silence save the monotonous clank of his sabre and the creak of girth and saddle.
"Ailsa!"
"Yes, Phil."
"Move closer; hold very tight to me; clasp both arms around my neck. . . . Are you seated firmly?"
"Yes, Phil."
He encircled her slender body with his right arm and, shaking out the bridle, launched his horse at a gallop down the sandy lane. Her breath and his mingled as they sped forward; the wind rushed by, waving the foliage on either hand; a steady storm of sand and gravel rained rattling through the bushes as the spurred horse bounded forward, breaking into a grander stride, thundering on through the gathering dusk.
Swaying, cradled in his embrace, her lips murmured his name, or, parted breathless, touched his, as the exquisitely confused sense of headlong speed dimmed her senses to a happy madness.
Trees, bushes, fences flew past and fled away behind in the dusk. It seemed to her as though she was being tossed through space locked in his arms; infinite depths of shadow whirled and eddied around her; limitless reaches, vistas unfathomable stretched toward outer chaos into which they were hurled, unseeing, her arms around his neck, her soft face on his breast.