"Splendid!" muttered John Glenning, intense pleasure showing on his face.
The girl turned to him with eyes which almost hurt.
"Can Marston's entries _possibly_ beat him?" she implored, impetuously raising her hand to his arm, but refraining from laying it there.
"Nothing that runs on four feet can beat him!" declared John, enthusiastically. "And I, like you, have seen horses run ever since I was big enough to know what a horse was. Ah! he is a noble animal--and how gracefully he runs! No wonder you love him, and I congratulate you on possessing him!"
Her lips parted for a quick reply, but she stopped and gazed down the track instead, where The Prince and his rider had at last come to a halt. She had started to say what was in her heart, to tell him that he had saved the colt for her twice, and that she would never forget it. Then that awful barrier had thrust itself before her eyes; that strange barrier of his terrible silence. She could not be free with him; she could not be as she was in the first days when they had met. Then she could say all she wished to say, but that was before she had awakened; before new thoughts and feelings and vague, unguessed desires had blossomed in her soul, at times almost drugging her with their subtle perfume. It was so different now. The world had changed. She had burst the chrysalis of girlhood, and her woman's nature was surging up in her, dominant, primordial, searching, calling, demanding its own! It gave her pain. She knew that with that hidden past cleared away, and the love words on his lips, she would have come to his arms with a sigh of content, and found rest, and peace, and joy. How he had proven himself! He was a man; gentle, strong, modest, brave. He was the incarnated hero of her girl dreams, standing this moment by her side--and yet how far away he was! Why would he not come closer! Surely he knew she would forgive and offer him the sweet haven of her arms, the solace of her lips and the caresses of her hands! Surely he loved her, for he was not deceitful, and that night, that awful, blissful night he had taken her to him and shielded her and led her home, and had plead with her for some tenderness. She could not give it then, though her heart was aching with love. She could not give it now, unless he would unseal his lips, and lay bare the hidden years. It was the test, and she knew it. She acknowledged it with inward fear, and her soul quaked. She could do nothing but wait. Hers was the bitter part; the hard portion. To wait--wait--and daily place a restraining hand upon her love; to crush it down into submission hour after hour as it rose up and demanded its own. How long? How long? Already it seemed ages, and his presence had come to bring suffering.