She loped Minerva easily across the island until she neared the other river, when color flushed suddenly over her cheeks and she raised a hand to tidy her blown hair. The rendezvous was near. Perhaps it was foolish and unladylike, meeting a strange man again like this. Her assent to his suggestion had been a mingling partly of bravado, partly of a sense of adventure, and mostly of a genuine attraction to this charmingly sensitive young man whose mind seemed so attuned to her own.

She had met him by chance three days ago. Minerva had caught a hoof in a rabbit hole and stumbled badly just as he appeared. He had been off his mount in a second, offering assistance. Together they anxiously examined the quivering marc, and were relieved to find no serious damage.

As she thanked him, Theo was conscious of his appraising stare. They looked at each other frankly.

He was young, she judged not more than twenty, and though he topped her by several inches, he was not tall: about the height of her father. That gave her obscure reassurance. His dress was careless : his brown pantaloons were wrinkled above mud-spattered Hessian boots; his neckcloth lay askew and seemed none too fresh. He wore no queue or hat, and his sandy hair, cut short to car length, was well tousled by the wind.

For all that, she knew he was a gentleman, and he attracted her. It might have been the magnetism of his hazel eyes—changeable, vital, and at the moment devouring her with pleased surprise; or the freshness of his skin which blushed as quickly as a girl's; or indeed his mellow young voice which now proclaimed with a flourish, 'Don Quixote is always at the service of the fair Dulcinea.'

'Oh!' she cried impulsively, 'I love that tale!' And they had drifted into talk of many books, both eager and flushed.

'Do you know this?' and 'Oh, yes, but have you read that?' She confessed to several works that no respectable young lady should have read, Molière, Sheridan, and Tristram Shandy but he did not seem shocked. They talked that morning almost as though they had been two young men—almost.

Then yesterday she had ridden that way again, and he had been there waiting at the turn of the road. It seemed natural to rest their horses and chat.

It was strange how well she felt she knew him, and yet they had touched on nothing personal. They had made a little game of the mystery. He called her 'Dulcinea,' and she called him nothing at all beyond the formal 'sir.'

He was now waiting for her, sitting easily on his big roan, and with his sandy head—much neater today—turned toward Deadman's Rock and the wooded prettiness of Blackwell's Island, which lay like a splinter of green in the East River.