“Help me up!”
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Independence. Have you no weaknesses?” And again a slow smile crept out of his eyes and rippled about his features like a wavelet on a pool.
“You can find out,” she retorted, vaulting into her saddle, and looking down at him.
“Will you wait on the beach? I won’t be five minutes.”
She was a little disappointed that he had not asked her to the tent. She was excited as she rode on, and told herself not to assume a manner that really did not belong to her. She was not at ease with him yet, and his looks kept attracting her attention away from the man inside. “Gosh,” she said to herself, “no man ought to look like that unless all men do. He’d make a vampire of a haloed saint.”
But she had felt something besides his looks, something that came out of him to meet her, a sudden joyous something that had delighted her. He had peered at her as one elf might at another passing in a green glade. She thought of some of the furtive looks that men on her father’s yacht and men at her father’s dinner-table had given her, and marvelled at the difference there could be in the admiration of a man’s eye.
As Dane saddled his horse he stifled an unpleasant suspicion that he had no business to snatch at this chance of breaking up his mood. Though he might go about with no outward consciousness of his looks, he knew only too well the effect of them on women. And then, Valerie was the daughter of Dave Carr, a fact he must not forget. But he had the impression that she was a mere girl, and a good deal of a tomboy. His estimate of her was hopelessly wrong, as he was to find out, but he had never been at first any judge of the character of women.
