Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/417

THE PAPERS I seemed to see that you lost touch—though you braved it out for me; that you had begun to be really uneasy and were giving him up. I seemed to see," she pursued after an hesitation, "that it was coming home to you that you had worked him up too high—that you were feeling, if I may say it, that you had better have stopped short. I mean short of this."

"You may say it," Bight answered. "I had better."

She had looked at him a moment. "There was more of him than you believed."

"There was more of him. And now," Bight added, looking across the river, "here's all of him."

"Which you feel you have on your heart?"

"I don't know where I have it." He turned his eyes to her. "I must wait."

"For more facts?"

"Well," he returned after a pause, "hardly perhaps for 'more' if—with what we have—this is all. But I've things to think out. I must wait to see how I feel. I did nothing but what he wanted. But we were behind a bolting horse—whom neither of us could have stopped."

"And he," said Maud, "is the one dashed to pieces."

He had his grave eyes on her. "Would you like it to have been me?"

"Of course not. But you enjoyed it—the bolt; everything up to the smash. Then, with that ahead, you were nervous."

"I'm nervous still," said Howard Bight.

Even in his unexpected softness there was something that escaped her, and it made in her, just a little, for irritation. "What I mean is that you enjoyed his terror. That was what led you on."

"No doubt—it was so grand a case. But do you call charging me with it," the young man asked, "not bearing hard?" 405