"Sylvia! You've got to understand!"
And in one such place her horse stumbled, and she pulled in and bent low over her saddle, and said, as if he had really spoken:
"I can't understand——"
Her outline was blurred, but her face was like a light in that shadowed valley. He didn't speak until they were up the hill and the wind had caught them.
"What?" he asked then.
Was it the glow, offered by the white earth rather than the sky, that made him fancy her lips quivered?
"Why you always try to hurt me."
He thought of her broken riding crop, of her attempts to hurt him every time he had seen her since the day she had tried to cut him with it. A single exception clung to his memory—the night of Betty's dance, years ago, when she had failed to remember him. Her words, therefore, carried a thrill, a colour of surrender, since from the very first she had made him attack for his own defence.
"That's an odd thing for you to say."
There were lights ahead, accents in the closing night for Blodgett's huge and ugly extravagance. They rode slowly up the drive.