They spoke no greeting. She merely backed into the room and Bruce followed with a show of slight embarrassment. Yet his gaze was full on her, steady, searching, intent. Only when she stopped and held out her hand did his manner of looking at her change. Then, he smiled and met her firm grasp with a hand that was cold and which trembled ever so slightly.
"He ... is he ..." she began in an uncertain voice.
"He's doin' fine, ma'am," he said, and her fingers tightened on his, sending a thrill up his arm and making its muscles contract to draw her a bit closer to him. "He's doin' fine," he repeated, relinquishing his grasp. "He's feelin' better an' lookin' better an' he'll begin to gain strength right off."
An inarticulate exclamation of gladness broke from her.
"Oh, it's been an age!" she said, smiling wanly and shaking her head slowly as she looked up into his face. "Every hour has seemed a day, every day a week. I didn't dare, didn't dare think; and I've hoped so long, with so little result that I didn't dare hope!"
She bowed her head and held her folded hands against her mouth. For a moment they were so, the cowboy looking down at her with a restless, covetous light in his eyes and it was the impulsive lifting of one hand as though he would stroke the blue-black braids that roused her.
"Come, sit down," she said, indicating a chair opposite hers by the open window. "I want you to tell me everything and I want to ask you if it isn't best that I go to him now.
He looked into her eyes as though he did not hear her words. Her expression of eager anticipation changed; her look wavered, she left off meeting his gaze and Bayard, with a start, moved in his chair.
"There ain't much to tell," he mumbled. "I got him home easy enough an' sent th' team back that day by a friend of mine who happened along...."
Her eyes returned to his face, riveting there with an impersonal earnestness that would not be challenged. Her red lips were parted as she sat with elbows on knees in the low rocker before him. It was his gaze, now, that wavered, but he hastened on with his recital of what he thought best to tell about what had occurred at his ranch in the last two days.
From time to time he glanced at her and on every occasion the mounting appreciation of her beauty, the unfaltering earnestness of her desire to learn every detail about her husband, the wonder that her sort could remain devoted to Ned Lytton's kind, combined to enrage him, to make him rebel hotly, even as he talked, at thought of such impossible human relations, and he was on the point of giving vent to his indignation when he remembered with a decided shock that on their first meeting she had told him that she loved her husband. Beyond that, he reasoned, nothing could be said.