the swift twilight of
the prairie was drawing down. Warm currents of air were passing like
waves of a sea of breath over the wide plains; the stars were softly
stinging the sky, and a bright moon was asserting itself in the growing
dusk. Here they were who, without words or acts, had been to each other
what Adam and Eve were in the Garden, without furtiveness, and guiltless
of secret acts which poison Love. What restrained them was native,
childlike camaraderie, intense, unusual and strange. The world would
call them romancists, if they believed that this restraint could be. But
there was something more. With all their frank childlikeness, there was
also a shyness, a reserve, which would not have been, if either had ever
eaten of the Fruit of Understanding until they met each other for the
first time.

"Are you--are you hurt?" he asked, his voice calmer than his spirit,
his heart beating terribly hard. "I'm all right," she answered. "I fell
soft. You see, I'm very light."

"No bones broken? Are you sure?" he asked solicitously.

She sat erect, drawing away from his arms and the support of his knee.
"Don't you see my legs and arms are all right! Help me up, please," she
added, and stretched out a hand.

Then, all at once, she saw the horse lying near. Again she shivered, and
her hand was thrown out in a gesture of pain.

"Oh, see-see!" she cried. "His leg is broken." She loved animals far
more than human beings. There were good reasons for it. She had fared
hard in life at the hands of men and women, because the only ones with
whom, in her seclusion, she had had to do, had sacrificed her, all save
one-the man beside her. Animal life had something in it akin to her own
voiceless being. Her spirit had never been vocal until Orlando came.

"Oh, how wicked I've been!" she cried.... "I couldn't bear it any
longer. He wouldn't let me ride alone, go anywhere alone. I had to do
it. I'd never ridden this horse before. My own mare wasn't fit.

"See-see. It's my ankle that ought to be broken, not his."

Orlando got to his feet. "Look the other way," he said. "Turn round,
please. I'll put him out of pain. He bolted with you, and he'd have
killed you, if he could; but that doesn't matter. He can't be saved.
Turn round, don't look this way."

She had been commanded to do things all her life, first by her mother,
tyrant-hearted and selfish, and then by her husband, an overlord, with a
savage soul; and she had obeyed always,