But Forbes was afraid of silence. It gave imagination too loose a rein. To keep himself from loving her too well, and offending her again after she had forgiven him once, he had recourse to language, the old concealer of thought.
At first he had been too new to the steps to talk freely. Words had blurted out of him as from a beginner in a riding-school. But now there was a spirit in his feet that led him who knows how?
Forbes astonished Persis and himself by his first words:
"Don't you ever sleep, Miss Cabot?"
She threw him a startled glance. "Do I look so jaded as all that?"
He was so upset that he lost step and regained it with awkwardness of foot and word. "No, no, it's be—because you look—you look as if you slept for—forever. I don't mean that exact—exactly, either."
"Then what do you mean, Mr. Forbes?"
"I mean: I left you this morning at about four o'clock in one costume, and I saw you at eight in another."
"At eight this morning? Oh yes, I was riding with my father. Were you riding, too? I didn't see you."
"Oh yes, you did. I stood on the bridge at daybreak. And you looked at me and cut me dead."