Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/119

Rh "I won't take a dare from anybody!" she answered, looking at him defiantly.

"Shucks," confided her brother Martin to his chum Winchester a little later. "I'm on to her. She'd have done it all right—if nobody had stopped her, but she knew darn well somebody would stop her," which was fairly astute even for younger brother, in which tribe no illusions dwell.

Myra Welch was just the opposite. She was slender and very dark, with a clear colourless complexion and slumbrous eyes veiled by indecently long lashes. Sometimes she raised them and looked appealing or helpless. She never thought of trying to climb into her sidesaddle without assistance. Her foot was small and arched. She placed the instep in the hollow of Kenneth's joined hands, and at a signal sprang lightly into the saddle. The brief momentary impact of her weight, the touch of her hand on his shoulder, the swirl of her habit as she hung her knee over the horn, the fumbling of her left foot for the stirrup—in which Kenneth must assist—all these possessed a strange and fascinating thrill. Twice or thrice he caught a glimpse of her silk stocking above her short boot, perhaps an inch or so lower than the hem of a modern skirt, but this was eighteen eighty-odd, and probably Myra got her effect. Then she would thank him demurely enough, but a fraction of a second before he would turn away she would raise her long demure lashes and gaze straight at him. Nor did she open gates, but waited. She had no brothers, but did not thereby escape brotherly criticisim. The three boys had grown up with her.

"Myra makes me sick!" said Win, bitterly. "I bet she gets his frat pin away from him in a month."

But for this sporting proposition he had no takers. Myra would certainly have had the fraternity emblem that acknowledgedly symbolic scalp of the college age—long before the month, had it not been that Kenneth was considerably intrigued by Dora's bold, vivid spirit. It was something he had not encountered in the East. Myra's type was not uncommon, though it must be confessed that she was Class A in her type.

Kenneth soon found that even the best horse he could hire at the big stables failed to do him sufficient honour. They were