"Don't let me drive you away."
"Why not?" He sought relief from the pressure of the circumstances by
affecting a lighter tone. "By your own account, you have stampeded three
men this afternoon. I shall be the fourth! The fugitives are counting up
like Falstaff's 'rogues in buckram.' Are you ready to go now? We are
leaving Mrs. Briscoe alone."
He did not offer to assist her to rise. Somehow, he could resist aught,
all, save the touch of that little hand. It brought back to him as
nothing else the girl he had loved, and who had loved him. Oh, he was
sure of it once! This woman was a changeling in some mystic sort--the
same in aspect, yet how alien to his ideal of yore!
She did not seem to mark the lapse of courtesy. She sat still, with her
broad gray hat tilted back on her head, a soft and harmonious contrast
with her golden hair and roseate face. Her ungloved hands were clasped in
her lap, her eyes were melancholy, meditative, fixed on the distant
mountains. "I wish we might reach some mutual calm thought of the past,
like the tranquil unimpassioned brightness of the close of this troubled,
threatening day.
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