"Supper suits most healthy men so far as I've noticed," she said carelessly, her glance sweeping keenly over him before it passed to the purple shadowings that already edged the mouth of a distant cañon.
"I'll bet it does when they can sit opposite Phyl Sanderson to eat it."
She frowned a little, the while he took her in out of half-shut, smoldering eyes, as one does a picture in a gallery. In truth, one might have ridden far to find a living picture more vital and more suggestive of the land that had cradled and reared her.
His gaze annoyed her, without her quite knowing why. "I wish you wouldn't look at me all the time," she told him with the boyish directness that still occasionally lent a tang to her speech.
"And if I can't help it?" he laughed.
"Fiddlesticks! You don't have to say pretty things to me, Brill Healy," she told him.
"I don't say them because I have to."
"Then I wish you wouldn't say them at all. There's no sense in it when you've known a girl eighteen years."
"Known and loved her eighteen years. It's a long time, Phyl."
Her eyes rained light derision on him. "It would be if it were true. But then one has to forget truth when one is sentimental, I reckon."