"I don't know," he floundered temporarily. "I heard somewhere that you
were from thereabouts."

Wolf, sliding up at that moment, sleek-footed and like a shadow, caused
her horse to shy and passed the awkwardness off, for they talked
Alaskan dogs until the conversation drifted back to horses. And horses
it was, all up the grade and down the other side.

When she talked, he listened and followed her, and yet all the while he
was following his own thoughts and impressions as well. It was a nervy
thing for her to do, this riding astride, and he didn't know, after
all, whether he liked it or not. His ideas of women were prone to be
old-fashioned; they were the ones he had imbibed in the early-day,
frontier life of his youth, when no woman was seen on anything but a
side-saddle. He had grown up to the tacit fiction that women on
horseback were not bipeds. It came to him with a shock, this sight of
her so manlike in her saddle. But he had to confess that the sight
looked good to him just then.

Two other immediate things about her struck him. First, there were the
golden spots in her eyes. Queer that he had never noticed them before.
Perhaps the light in the office had not been right, and perhaps they
came and went. No; they were glows of color--a sort of diffused,
golden light. Nor was it golden, either, but it was nearer that than
any color he knew. It certainly was not any shade of yellow. A
lover's thoughts are ever colored, and it is to be doubted if any one
else in the world would have called Dede's eyes golden. But Daylight's
mood verged on the tender and melting, and he preferred to think of
them as golden, and therefore they were golden.

And then she was so natural. He had been prepared to find her a most
difficult young woman to get acquainted with. Yet here it was proving
so simple. There was nothing highfalutin about her company manners--it
was by this homely phrase that he differentiated this Dede on horseback
from the Dede with the office manners whom he had always known. And
yet, while he was delighted with the smoothness with which everything
was going, and with the fact that they had found plenty to talk about,
he was aware of an irk under it all. After all, this talk was empty
and idle. He was a man of action, and he wanted her, Dede Mason, the
woman; he wanted her to love him and to be loved by him; and he wanted
all this glorious consummation then and there. Used to forcing issues