"We must be going home. I
have an engagement to go riding with Mr. Bromfield."
The man beside the girl kept his smile working and concealed the little
stab of jealousy that dirked him. Colin Whitford had confided to
Lindsay that his daughter was practically engaged to Clarendon
Bromfield and that he did not like the man. The range-rider did not
like him either, but he tried loyally to kill his distrust of the
clubman. If Beatrice loved him there must be good in the fellow. Clay
meant to be a good loser anyhow.
There had been moments when the range-rider's heart had quickened with
a wild, insurgent hope. One of these had been on a morning when they
were riding in the Park, knee to knee, in the dawn of a new clean
world. It had come to him with a sudden clamor of the blood that in
the eternal rightness of things such mornings ought to be theirs till
the youth in them was quenched in sober age. He had looked into the
eyes of this slim young Diana, and he had throbbed to the certainty
that she too in that moment of tangled glances knew a sweet confusion
of the blood. In her cheeks there had been a quick flame of flying
color. Their talk had fallen from them, and they had ridden in a shy,
exquisite silence from which she had escaped by putting her horse to a
canter.
But in the sober sense of sanity Clay knew that this wonderful thing
was not going to happen to him. He was not going to be given her
happiness to hold in the hollow of his hand.
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