ins, who
had set his eyes upon no woman for a half year, who had looked on no
woman of her obvious class and type for two years, who had seen the
woman of one half her physical loveliness and tugging charm never, the
effect was instant and tremendous. A little shiver went through him; his
eyes caught fire.

CHAPTER IV

THE FORD

"These little cotton-tail rabbits," he said to her slowly, without
turning his eyes from hers to those of whom he spoke, "haven't any more
sense than you'd think to look at them. Once let them get a notion in
their heads.... Look here!" he broke off sharply. "You don't think the
same way they do, do you?"

"No!" she said hurriedly.

Hurriedly, because for the moment her poise had fled from her and she
knew that he must note the high colour in her cheeks. And the colour had
come not in response to his words but in quick answer to his look. A
young giant of a man, he stood staring at her like some artless boy who
at a bend in the road had stopped, breathless, to widen his eyes to the
smile of a fairy fresh from fairy land.

And her "No," was the true reply to his question and burst spontaneously
from her lips. Her first swift suspicion when she had seen the bulk of
him framed against the bleak night had been quite natural. But now that
she had marked the man's carriage and had seen his face and looked for
one instant deep into his clear eyes, she set her conjecture aside as an
absurdity. It was not so much that her reason had risen to demand why a
successful highwayman should return into danger and the likelihood of
swift punishment. It was rather and simply because she felt that this
bronzed young stranger, seeming to her woman's instinct a sort of breezy
incarnation of the outdoors, partook of none of the characteristics of
the footpad, sneak thief or nocturnal gentleman of the road. An
essential attribute of the boldest and most picturesque of that gentry
was the quality of deceit and subterfuge and hypocrisy. Consecutive
logical thought being, after all, a tedious process, she had had no time
to progress from step to step of deduction and inference; he had asked
his question with a startling abruptness and as abruptly she had given
him her answer. The rest might believe what they chose to believe. She
for her part, held Buck Thornton, whoever he might be, guiltless of the
earlier affair of the evening. And, moreover, she could quite understand
the impulse that sent an innocent