Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/37

gathered her up in his arm after a fall on the Bridle Path just under the Seventy-Second Street bridge, where the deep shadow of the arch gave too abrupt a change from sunlight to gloom and caused her horse to swerve, buck, and then bolt riderless as far as the Sheep-fold. But it was Officer McGlinchy who picked up Teddie, with what he described as "a foine bump on the bean," little dreaming that through his purely official and impersonal ministrations he was bruising Teddie's heart almost as badly as the Bridle Path had bruised her head. Teddie's passion remained a secret one, it is true, but the promised vision of the statuesque Patrick McGlinchy gave a new interest to her morning canter along the Bridle Path and a richer coloring to the sward and rocks of Central Park. It was not until she was on the eve of forlornly engineering still another fall in the neighborhood of that over-taciturn officer that Teddie learned McGlinchy was sedately married and the father of seven little McGlinchys down in the Ninth Ward.