"I know it," she said, surprised and a trifle perplexed. "I seem to hear you when you are mute, and I turn to find you looking at me, as though you had asked me something."
We rode on, thoughtful, silent, aware of a new and wordless intimacy.
"It is pleasant to be with you," she said at last. "I have never before found untroubled contentment save when I am alone.... Everything that you see and think of on this ride I seem to see and think of, too, and know that you are observing with the same delight that I feel.... Nor does anything in the world disturb my happiness. Nor do you vex me with silence when I would have you speak; nor with speech when I ride dreaming--as I do, cousin, for hours and hours--not sadly, but in the sweetest peace--"
Her voice died out like a June breeze; our horses, ear to ear moved on slowly in the fragrant silence.
"To ride ... forever ... together," she mused, "looking with perfect content on all the world.... I teaching you, or you me; ... it's all one for the delight it gives to be alive and young.... And no trouble to await us, ... nothing malicious to do a harm to any living thing.... I could renounce Heaven for that.... Could you?"
"Yes.... For less."
"I know I ask too much; grief makes us purer, fitting us for the company of blessed souls. They say that even war may be a holy thing--though we are commanded otherwise.... Cousin, at moments a demon rises in me and I desire some forbidden thing so ardently, so passionately, that it seems as if I could fight a path through paradise itself to gain what I desire.... Do you feel so?"
"Yes."
"Is it not consuming--terrible to be so shaken?... Yet I never gain my desire, for there in my path my own self rises to confront me, blocking my way. And I can never pass--never.... Once, in winter, our agent, Mr. Fonda, came driving a trained caribou to a sledge. A sweet, gentle thing, with dark, mild eyes, and I was mad to drive it--mad, cousin! But Sir Lupus learned that it had trodden and gored a man, and put me on my honor not to drive it. And all day Sir Lupus was away at Kingsborough for his rents and I free to drive the sledge, ... and I was mad to do it--and could not. And the pretty beast stabled with our horses, and every day I might have driven it.... I never did.... It hurts yet, cousin.... How strange is it that to us the single word, 'honor,' blocks the road and makes the King's own highway no thorough-fare forever!"
She gathered bridle nervously, and we launched our horses through a willow fringe and away over a soft, sandy intervale, riding knee to knee till the wind whistled in our ears and the sand rose fountain high at every stride of our bounding horses.