“Maybe he wants his siesta, who knows? Or perhaps he feels that we have had our money’s worth out of the horses, but, as I explained when I hired them, I need horses that can carry me all day if need be and mine is certainly not tired as yet.”

She bent forward to pat the glossy neck of the beautiful animal she was riding and then she looked at her cousin’s face and guessed his thoughts before he spoke them aloud.

“You are sensing danger, Jimmy, and you are wondering what arguments you can use to persuade me to turn back. You need not speak the words I see trembling on your lips. I know exactly what you will say and it’s quite useless.”

“In that case I suppose we go on.”

There was a slight irritation in Jimmy Donaldson’s voice.

He had been a Diplomat all his life, but sometimes he found his young cousin’s flouting of the conventions and her utter disregard for danger extremely irritating.

He was very fond of Skye. He had known her since she was born, for her father had been his first cousin and they had more or less been brought up together.

But whereas Arthur Standish had been an easy, good-natured, uncomplicated character, his daughter was very different.

“Yes, it’s my American blood,” Skye said aloud, again sensing what Jimmy was thinking, and added, “I wish you had known my mother – well, I mean.”

“She was a very lovely person to look at.”

“She was lovely in herself, too. So gay, so brave and exciting to be with. Oh, Jimmy, if only she had not died when I was too young to appreciate her!”

“It was a tragedy,” Jimmy agreed, “and yet the accident might never have happened if she had been a little more careful.”

“I could never imagine my mother being particularly careful about anything, but I had so little time with her, especially as I was only allowed to be with her in America for a part of my holidays.”

Her eyes darkened for a moment and Jimmy Donaldson thought, as he had thought before, how miserable it could be for the children of divorced parents with their divided loyalties and their feeling of instability without a proper home and a proper background.

“I suppose in a way everything connected with my mother seems to be brighter and more glorious simply because I saw so little of her,” Skye said honestly. “My upbringing in England certainly always seemed very tame compared with the excitements I could find at my grandfather’s house in Long Island or on his ranch in California. And you must remember those visits were very rare after my mother died, but now, as I look back at them, they are indivisibly mixed in my mind with my grandmother’s stories of Mariposa.”

“Did she come out here when she was a girl?” Jimmy asked.