“And I—I have seen you, with the sword, and the powdered hair, and the blue coat and the buff waistcoat. It is a buff waistcoat like that my great-grandfather wears in his pictures.”
“It is a buff waistcoat,” he said, all sense of strangeness gone.
The roses she held dropped on the gravel, and she put out her hand against his horse's flank. In an instant he had leaped from his saddle, and his arm was holding her. She did not resist, marvelling rather at his own steadiness, nor did she then resent a tenderness in his voice.
“I hope you will forgive me—Virginia,” he said. “I should not have mentioned this. And yet I could not help it.”
She looked up at him rather wildly.
“It was I who stopped you,” she said; “I was waiting for—”
“For whom?”
The interruption brought remembrance.
“For my cousin, Mr. Colfax,” she answered, in another tone. And as she spoke she drew away from him, up the driveway. But she had scarcely taken five steps whey she turned again, her face burning defiance. “They told me you were not coming,” she said almost fiercely. “Why did you come?”
It was a mad joy that Stephen felt.