Page:The man on horseback (IA manonhorseback00abdurich).pdf/37

Rh during dinner now and again when the conversation turned to Berlin; and, somehow, it seemed impossible to keep away from the subject. Bertha was young and impressionable. She had just returned from Germany after her first visit abroad; and all she had seen there, and felt and heard, was very vivid in her memory, and very important.

Tom Graves looked at her rather ruefully. He was deeply in love with her, and he said to himself that she was different from the girl he used to know, different from the clear-eyed Western girl who had ridden by his side across the rolling range of the Killicott. Harder she seemed, more sure of herself, less considerate of other people's feelings, more stubborn and unreasonable in the swing of her own prejudices, more critical and skeptical; and after dinner, when Mrs. Wedekind had left the house to call on a neighbor while her husband was stealing a surreptitious forty winks behind the shelter of the evening paper, the change struck him more forcibly than ever.

Bertha was at the piano, her fingers softly sweeping the keys while she hummed a German song:

Tom looked at her: at the tiny points of light that danced in her fair hair, the soft curve of her neck, the slim, straight young shoulders, and he took a deep breath, like a man about to jump. He was what his life had made him, the range, the free roaming, the open, vaulted sky. Simple he was and just a little stubborn; at times easily embarrassed, but of a lean veracity, with himself and other people, that