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iciency, but the first movement of the strained wrist brought a flush of pain to her cheeks. She sat back, pursing her lips together to restrain an involuntary groan, while the stranger flashed a second look in her direction. He was a tall, lean, somewhat cadaverous--looking man, with steel-like eyes shaded by haughty eyelids, perpetually adroop as though no object on earth were worthy of his regard. Cornelia took him in in a swift, comprehensive glance, and with youthful ardour decided that she loathed the creature. "Hurt yourself?" "Not a bit, thanks. I guess there's enough of you to do the work without me, but I'm used to seeing things done in a hurry, and you seemed pretty deliberate--" "A little caution is not thrown away sometimes. What induced you to come out driving alone if you could not manage a horse?" There being no reply to this question, and the last buckle of the harness being unstrapped, the speaker turned an inquiring glance over his shoulder, to behold a rigid figure and a face ablaze with indignation. There was something in the girl's face at that moment so vital, so bizarre and arresting, that so long as Rupert Guest lived, it remained with him as one of the most striking pictures in his mental picture- gallery. He had but to pass a high green hedge in the June sunshine, to catch the fragrance of the honeysuckle and roses, and it rose up before him again--the white, furious face, with the red, roughened locks, and the gleam of white teeth through the scarlet lips. There was no admiration in his thoughts; this was not at all the type of girl whom he admired, but she was a being by herself, different from anyone whom he had met. He stared at her with curious attention. "Do you mean," said Cornelia, in the slow, even tones of intense anger, "that you think this was my doing--that I upset the cart by my bad driving? If that's so, you are a little out in your reckoning. If I hadn't been used to horses all my days we might have been in kingdom come by this time. I _pulled_ her into the bank before worse things happened!" "Then what sent her off in the first instance?" "A poll parrot, screeching in its cage, set right out in the roadway by some fool owner, who ought to be had up for murder." The stranger pursed up his lips in an expressive whistle, then suddenly sprang upwards as the mare, freed from her harness, rolled on her side and struggled to her feet, where she stood sh
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