“No, don’t whip him,” said the elderly woman. “I don’t believe he’s to blame; I don’t think he was hitched up just right in the first place. The boys said there was something the matter with the harness; but they guessed it would go.”
“Very well,” answered Mrs. Farrell; “he’s your horse, but if he were mine, I should whip him; that’s what I should do.”
Her eyes lightened as she stooped forward to gather up the reins, which had been twitched out of her hands, and the horse started and panted again, while Easton stood beside him in grave embarrassment. He made several efforts to clear his throat, and then said, huskily, “What do you want me to do? Shall I lead him? I don’t know much about horses.”
He addressed himself doubtfully to the whole party, but Mrs. Woodward answered: “Won’t you please get in alongside of that lady? I shouldn’t want he should think he had scared us; and he would, if we let you lead him.”
Easton obediently mounted to Mrs. Farrell’s side. She was going to offer him the reins, but Mrs. Woodward interposed. “No, you drive, Mrs. Farrell, so long as he behaves;” and the horse now moved tremulously but peaceably off. “We’re very much obliged to you for what you’ve done,” she added; and then Easton sat beside Mrs. Farrell, with nothing to do but to finger his cane and study the horse’s mood. He glanced shyly at her face; from her silks breathed those intoxicating mysterious odors of the toilette; the light wind blew him the odor of her hair; when by and by the horse began to sadden, under the long uphill strain, into a repentant walk, and she gave him a smart cut with the whip, Easton winced as if he had himself been struck. But the lady paid him very little attention for some time; then, when her anxieties about the horse seemed to have subsided somewhat, she looked him in the face and demanded, “If you know so little about horses how came you to stop him so well?”
“I don’t know,” said Easton. “It was rather sudden; I didn’t— I had no choice—”
“Oh,” exulted Mrs. Farrell, “then if you could have chosen, you’d have let him go dancing on with us. I withdraw my gratitude for your kindness. But,” she added, owning her recognition of him with a courage he found charming, “I’ll thank you again for picking up that little book of mine, yesterday. You certainly might have chosen to let it lie.”
Easton, if brought to bay in his shyness, had a desperate sort of laugh, in which he uttered his heart as freely as a child; he set his teeth hard, and while he looked at you with gleaming eyes the laughter gurgled helplessly from his throat. It had a sound that few could hear without liking. It made Mrs. Farrell laugh too, and he began to breathe more freely in the rarefied atmosphere that had at first fluttered his pulses. She spoke from time to time to Mrs. Woodward or Rachel, who, the first excitement over, appeared distinctly to relinquish him to her as part of that summer-boarding world with which they could have only business relations.
They came presently to a turn in the road which brought the farmhouse in sight, and Mrs. Farrell lifted her whip to encourage the horse for the sharper ascent now before him; but she abruptly dropped her hand, and bowed her face on the back of it.
Then very gravely, “I beg your pardon,” she said to Easton, “but I don’t know how we are going to account for you to the people in the house. What should you say you were doing here?”