She considered him gravely, and he stared back. Whatever she saw, he
found her decidedly good to look upon, not only because of her eyes and
hair and clear, satiny skin, but because of the lithe, clean-run shape
of her, which he admired as he would that of a horse, or an athlete's in
training. She broke the silence abruptly.

"Do you know what my trunk weighs?"

He glanced back at it, shaking his head. "No. It's riding all right
there."

"Do you know what I weigh?"

"Perhaps a hundred and thirty."

"Ten pounds more. And the trunk weighs more than two hundred."

"Well, what about it?" Angus asked, puzzled.

"What about it? Are you in the habit of picking up trunks like that as
if they were meat platters, and girls as if they were babies? I was
watching you, and you didn't even breathe hard."

"Oh, is that it?" Angus laughed. "That's nothing. Any of your brothers
could handle that trunk."

"Gavin could, of course. But he's very strong."

"Well?" said Angus, smiling at her.

"Why, yes, you must be. But I've always thought of you as a boy. And I
suppose you've thought of me as a gawky, long-legged girl."

"I haven't thought of you at all," Angus told her.

"Now I know I'm going to like you," she laughed. "I don't know a
man--except my brothers, who of course don't count--who would have told
me that."

Angus flushed, but stuck to his guns.

"Well, why should I think of you?"

"No reason. You don't know much about girls, do you?"

"Not a thing. I have had no time for them."

"And no use for them!"

"I did not say that."

"But you looked it, Angus. I'll never forget the look of relief on your
face years ago when we appeared to take poor, little lost Faith Winton
off your hands--and off your pony. And yet she liked you. She speaks
still of how good and kind you were to her, though you frightened her at
first."

"She must be thinking of Jean's doughnuts," Angus grinned. "I had
forgotten all about it. Where is she now?"

"I don't know. She and her father were in Italy when I heard from her
last."

"She would be grown up," Angus deduced. "I wonder if I would know her?"

But the French ranch hove in sight, its big two-story house and maze of
stables in a setting of uncared-for fields, which Angus never saw
without something akin to pain. A chorus of dogs greeted the sound of
wheels, and half a dozen of them shot around the corner of the house.

Angus liked dogs, but not when he was driving colts