I should be so pleased, if it would not trouble you. There's a
steep place or two--but I think there's no danger."
"I shall not be afraid."
She smiled so graciously, and, as she fully believed, maternally, that
he looked at her the second time. To his first hurried impression of
her as an elegant and delicately nurtured woman--one of the class of
distinguished tourists that fashion was beginning to send thither--he
had now to add that she had a quantity of fine silken-spun light hair
gathered in a heavy braid beneath her gray hat; that her mouth was
very delicately lipped and beautifully sensitive; that her soft skin,
although just then touched with excitement, was a pale faded velvet, and
seemed to be worn with ennui rather than experience; that her eyes
were hidden behind a strip of gray veil whence only a faint glow was
discernible. To this must still be added a poetic fancy all his own
that, as she sat there, with the skirt of her gray habit falling from
her long bodiced waist over the mustang's fawn-colored flanks, and with
her slim gauntleted hands lightly swaying the reins, she looked like
Queen Guinevere in the forest. Not that he particularly fancied Queen
Guinevere, or that he at all imagined himself Launcelot, but it was
quite in keeping with the suggestion-haunted brain of John Milton
Harcourt, whom the astute reader has of course long since recognized.
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