Her purity seemed to be replenished after the storms of love, as the blue sky came back innocent and untarnished after a black cloud and lightning. Quick tempests rose and passed, and a fleet angelic quality brought her down to earth on and in a rainbow from heaven.
He found himself studying her as a botanist studies a flower. In their loneliness they dwelt as on a desert island.
But she could ride a little and he had good saddle horses, and she found many occasions for excursions to White Plains. They rode often together up to the Northcastle post office, where the stage flung off the New York papers and the letters. She had a brave beauty as she rode, her long skirt like a spinnaker at the horse’s flank, her veil flying from her hat, her silhouette one with the horse’s back, where her arched thigh rose above it and clasped the saddle horn.
The news from the city was blacker every day, and she was more and more content with her exile, until a letter came to tell her that Harry Chalender had not died after all, but had somehow won his duel with the Asiatic death. The same post brought her word that her father had also passed the crisis. She made a great noise of delight in the recovery of her father. But she said nothing more of Harry Chalender.
And so his name rang aloud in the back of RoBards’ mind. He was hard to please: if she had exclaimed upon Chalender’s escape he would have winced. Yet her silence was unendurable.
In a ferocious quarrel that began in nothing at all, and was, on his part, only the outcry of a love too exacting, because it was too hungry, she flung at him:
“I needn’t have married you, Mist’ RoBards! You made me. You kept at me.”
“Hush, sweetheart!” he pleaded, “you don’t want the servants to hear.”
“What do I care for servants? If I hadn’t been such a fool as to listen to you, I might have married Harry Chalender.”
“Hush!” he stormed, “or, by——”