Roland dropped her hand; he caught his horse and mounted it. In a moment he was at her side again.
“Justine!”
And the girl turning to him let her fresh lips meet and rest upon his own. Slowly he disengaged the arm with which he had steadied himself on her waist.
“If I lose you now—” he began.
“There can be no question of losing,” she interrupted. “Have we not come into our own?”
“But others may dispute our right. There is your cousin, to whom I thought you were engaged; and there is your father.”
“Oh, as for Guy—” and she made a gesture. “Father, it is true, may object; but let him. I am satisfied; in the end he will be satisfied also. Why, only the other day I wrote him you were here.”
“H’m!” At the intelligence he wheeled abruptly.
Already Justine had turned, and lowering her crop she gave her horse a little tap. The beast was willing enough; in a moment the two were on a run, and as Roland’s horse, a bronco, by-the-way, one of those eager animals that decline to remain behind, rushed forward and took the lead, “Remember!” she cried, “you are not to leave me now.”
But the bronco was self-willed, and this injunction Roland found or pretended it difficult to obey; and together, through the green lane and out of it, by long, dismal fields of rice, into the roomy squalor of the village and on to the hotel, they flew as though some fate pursued. Justine never forgot that ride, nor did Roland either.
At the veranda steps Mrs. Metuchen was in waiting. “I have a telegram from your father,” she called to Justine. “He wishes you to return tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” the girl exclaimed.
“Thorold has learned I am here, and has told,” her lover reflected. And swinging from his saddle he aided the girl to alight.
“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Metuchen with large assumption of resignation replied; “and we may be thankful he did not say today.”
And as Roland listened to the varying interpretations of the summons which, during the absence of her charge, Mrs. Metuchen’s riotous imagination had found time to conceive, “Thorold has told,” he repeated to himself, “but he has told too late.”
After a morning such as that, an afternoon on a piazza is apt to drag. Of this Roland was conscious. Moreover, he had become aware that his opportunities were now narrowly limited; and presently, as Mrs. Metuchen’s imaginings subsided and ceased, he asked the girl whether, when dinner was over, she would care to take a drive.
Protest who may, at heart every woman is a matchmaker; and Mrs. Metuchen was not an exception. In addition to this, she liked family-trees, she was in cordial sympathy with good-breeding, and Roland, who possessed both, had, through attentions which women of her age appreciate most, succeeded in detaining her regard. In conversation, whenever Justine happened to be mentioned, she had a habit of extolling that young woman—not beyond her deserts, it is true, but with the attitude of one aware that the girl had done something which she ought to be ashamed of, yet to which no one was permitted to allude. This attitude was due to the fact that she suspected her, and suspected that everyone else suspected her, of an attachment for her cousin Guy. Now Guy Thorold had never appealed to Mrs. Metuchen. He was not prompt with a chair; when she unrolled her little spangle of resonant names he displayed no eagerness in face or look. Such things affect a woman. They ruffle her flounces and belittle her in her own esteem. As a consequence, she disliked Guy Thorold; from the heights of that dislike she was even wont to describe him as Poke—a word she could not have defined had she tried, but which suggested to her all the attributes of that which is stupid and underbred. Roland, on the other hand, seemed to her the embodiment of just those things which Thorold lacked, and in the hope that he might cut the cousin out she extolled him to her charge in indirect and subtle ways. You young men who read this page mind you of this: if you would succeed in love or war, be considerate of women who are no longer young. They ask but an attention, a moment of your bountiful days, some little act of deference, and in exchange they sound your praises more deftly than ever trumpeter or beat of drums could do.
But because Mrs. Metuchen had an axe of her own to grind was not to her mind a reason why she should countenance a disregard of the Satanic pomps of that which the Western press terms Etiquette. And so it happened that, when Roland asked Justine whether she would care to drive, before the girl could answer, the matron stuck her oar in:
“Surely, Mr. Mistrial, you cannot think Miss Dunellen could go with you alone. Not that I see any impropriety in her doing so, but there is the world.”
The world at that moment consisted of a handful of sturdy consumptives impatiently waiting the opening of the dining-room doors. And as Roland considered that world, he mentally explored the stable.
“Of course not,” he answered; “if Miss Dunellen cares to go, I will have a dogcart and a groom.”
With that sacrifice to conventionality Mrs. Metuchen was content. For Justine to ride unchaperoned was one thing, but driving was another matter. And later on, in the cool of the afternoon, as Roland bowled the girl over the yielding sand, straight to the sunset beyond, he began again on the duo which they had already rehearsed, and when Justine called his attention to the groom, he laughed a little, and well he might. “Don’t mind him,” he murmured; “he is deaf.”
In earlier conversations he had rarely spoken of himself,
