Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/34

 and Tom sit sideways in the saddle. She made a very good job of the creature's rump and tail, and she had somehow managed to give Tom himself a hawk-like intensity that was rather like him. Indeed, she saw it herself, and she painted the words "The Hawk" underneath it and presented it to Lucius.

"Well!" said Lucius, and got out his glasses. "The hawk, eh? And where is his prey, my dear?"

After which he sent Tom out on the Reservation and took good care to leave him there until the lady had departed. He was not a man to leave anything to chance.

It is too much to say, of course, that Kay had made no impression on Tom McNair. She disturbed him not at all, but he certainly knew she was about; a slim boyish figure with a clipped head, clad in riding breeches and a soft shirt mostly, but in the evenings very feminine in her soft light frocks, with her arms bare and that string of pearls that Lucius had bought her grandmother before she died, too late because they came when she had ceased to care to call attention to her neck.

She had a way of standing—Kay, that is—with her chin up and her hands thrust in her breeches pockets, and of being about when he was.

"Good morning, Mr. McNair."

"Morning, Miss Dowling."

"It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

"Pretty fair. Weather's what we ain't got nothing else ut."

She would look after him as he passed on, leather chaps swishing, neckerchief blowing, flannel shirt stretched taut over his shoulders, his Stetson hat shading his handsome arrogant face. She always felt very small and unimportant at those times; rather, as Bessie might have put it, like something the cat had brought in. And this was the more tragic because she began to realize that the ache of his appeal to her was like a physical pain. Once Herbert caught her looking after him and had a suspicion of the truth, but she was learning guile for the first time.

"He certainly looks the part, doesn't he?" she said.