“Don’t trouble yourself,” she coolly replied, “it is a matter of no moment to me.”
“There, now, you are insincere,” said Harry, with a saucy smile, leaning forward to strike a fly from Saladin’s neck, “it is a matter of some moment to you, for you know that I love you, and that you are not entirely indifferent to my love.”
“Sir, you mistake in addressing such language to me—you are presuming,” said Kate, with a petrifying hauteur; and giving her horse a smart cut with the whip, galloped on. Surprised, and somewhat angry, Harry checked his own horse, and gazed after her till she was lost in a bend of the winding road. As he stood by the side of the rivulet, Saladin reached down his head to drink. In his troubled abstraction, Harry let go the rein, which fell over the head of his horse. With a muttered something, which was not a benediction, Harry dismounted to regain it, when Saladin, in one of his mad freaks, gave a quick leap away and galloped up the glen after his mate. Harry was about to follow, but an odd thought coming into his brain, he threw himself on the turf instead, and lay perfectly still, with closed eyes, listening to the gallop of the two steeds, far up the glen. Presently he heard them stop—then turn, and come dashing down again with redoubled speed. Nearer and nearer came Kate. She was at his side—with a cry of alarm she threw herself from her horse and bent above him.
“Harry, dear Harry, were you thrown—are you injured?” she cried, raising the head of the apparently unconscious man, and supporting it on her knee. “Oh, Heaven! he is hurt—he does not hear me!” she murmured, laying back the hair from his forehead and pressing her lips upon it wildly and repeatedly. Harry’s eye-lids remained hermetically sealed, but a queer, comical expression began to play around the corners of his mouth, and was about to betray him, when he suddenly opened his eyes, with a look of triumphant impudence, and broke into a peal of joyous laughter.
Kate dropped his head with a movement of indignation and dismay—sprung up—led her horse to the trunk of a fallen tree, just by, from which she leaped into her saddle, and was off almost as soon as Harry had regained his feet. Again the faithless Saladin left his master in the lurch, and followed Kate, who went at a furious rate, never pausing nor looking back; so the somewhat discomforted Harry was obliged to foot it home, a matter of “twa mile and a bittock,” as they say in Scotland.
That night Kate had a headache, and did not appear at the tea-table, nor join the evening circle, where poor Harry was cross-questioned without mercy on the strange circumstance of having been left behind both by his horse and lady-fair.
“Ah, Kate,” said I, as I joined her at the close of the evening, “I have something to tell you. While you were dressing for your ride to-day, Harry called me into his room to show me that picture—and will you believe, it is only a bad portrait of yourself! Harry sketched it long ago for Louisa Grant, but has lately been making some important alterations, and now he thinks it strikingly like you. I really wonder we did not see the resemblance; the poetry was meant for you alone.”
“Oh, Grace, Grace!” murmured Kate, in a bitter tone, “if you had only told me this before I went to ride!”
At breakfast, the next morning, there was no Harry—two hours before he had whistled his dog and shouldered his gun, and set out on a crusade in turkey-land. But long before noon the young hunter returned, and inquiring for Kate, was directed to the library, where she sat, striving to drive away her sad mood, according to her own cheerful philosophy, by light reading. She had chosen “Hood’s Prose and Verse,” instead of Miss Landon’s Poems, which stood on the same shelf.
Again I must tell the story as it was told to me.