A young woman on horseback was before him. Her pony stood across the road, and she looked up a trail which ran down into it. The lifted poise of the head brought out its fine lines and the distinction with which it was set upon the well-molded throat column. Apparently she was calling to some companion on the trail who had not yet emerged into view.
At sound of his footsteps the rider’s head turned.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Hobart,” she said quietly, as coolly as if her heart had not suddenly begun to beat strangely fast.
“Good afternoon, Miss Balfour.”
Each of them was acutely conscious of the barrier between them. Since the day when she had told him of her engagement they had not met, even casually, and this their first sight of each other was not without embarrassment.
“We have been to Lone Pine Cone,” she said rather hurriedly, to bridge an impending silence.
He met this obvious statement with another as brilliant.
“I walked out from town. My horse is a little lame.”
But there was something she wanted to say to him, and the time for saying it, before the arrival of her companion, was short. She would not waste it in commonplaces.
“I don’t usually read the papers very closely, but this morning I read both the Herald and the Sun. Did you get my note?”