He rose to his feet, slowly, and stood for a moment lost in thought. Then he looked down at her, a fresh admiration shining in his eyes.
"Yours is the inspiration and the insight—as always," he said humbly. "It has always been so. I have seemed to myself to have blundered and stumbled, groping for a way; and you have flown, swift as a shining arrow, straight to the mark."
"No, no, no, no!" she disclaimed, coming close to him in the vigour of her denial. "You are unfair."
She looked up into his face, and somehow in the earnestness of her disclaimer, the feminine soul of her rose to her eyes, so that again Bob saw the tender, appealing helplessness, and once more there arose to full tide in his breast the answering tenderness that would care for her and guard her from the rough jostling of the world. The warmth of her young body tingled in recollection along his arm, and then, strangely enough, without any other direct cause whatever, the tide rose higher to flood his soul. He drew her to him, crushing her to his breast. For an instant she yielded to him utterly; then drew away in a panic.
"My dear, my dear!" she half whispered; "not here!"
XLI
Bob rode home through the forest, singing at the top of his voice. When he met his father, near the lower meadow, he greeted the older man boisterously.
"That," said Orde to him shrewdly, "sounds to me mighty like relief. Have you decided for or against?"