On the following morning, Sunday, Lee rode with Claire Morris. Fanny, disinclined to activity, stayed by the open fire, with the illustrated sections of the newspapers and her ornamental sewing. Claire was on, a tall bright bay always a little ahead of Lee, and he was constantly urging his horse forward. “Peyton went to the Green Spring Valley for a hunt party last night,” she told him; “he said he'd be back.” Why, then, he almost exclaimed, he, Lee, had been successful with Mina Raff. Instead he said that she would undoubtedly be glad of that. “Oh, yes! But neither of us is very much excited about it just now; he is too much like a ball on a rubber string; and if I were a man I'd hate to resemble that. I won't try to hide from you that I've lost something; still, I have him and Mina hasn't. They shouldn't have hesitated, Lee; that was what spoiled it, in the end beat them. It wasn't strong enough to carry them away and damn the consequences. There is always something to admire in that, even if you suffer from it.” The night had been warm, and the road, the footing, was treacherous with loosened stones and mud. The horses, mounting a hill, picked their way carefully; and Lee Randon gazed over his shoulder into the valley below. He saw it through a screen of bare wet maple branches--a dripping brown meadow lightly wreathed in blue mist, sedgy undergrowth along water and the further ranges of hills merged in shifting clouds. A shaft of sunlight, pale and without warmth, illuminated with its emphasis an undistinguished and barren spot. On the meadows sloping to the south there were indefinite spaces of green. Claire was heedless of their surroundings. “What does surprise and disturb me,” she continued vigorously, “is that I haven't any sympathy for him. That is gone too; I only have a feeling that he bitched it. As you may observe, Lee, I am not at all admirable this morning: a figure of inconsistency. And the reason will amaze you--I've rather come to envy what they might have had. I am afraid that if the positions of Mina and me had been reversed I wouldn't have seen you in New York. I found that out last night when I knew Peyton wasn't going. What he said over and over was that everything could be just as it was.” She laughed, riding easily, subconsciously, on the snaffle rein. “Peyton's simplicity is marvelous. In a year, or maybe less, he will be quite the same as always. I had nothing to do with it; Peyton and Mina will go on as fresh as daisies; yet only I'll be damaged or, anyway, changed. What shall I do about it?” she demanded of Lee Randon, so sharply that her horse shied. “About what?” he returned. “My senses are so dulled by your ingratitude that I can't gather what you mean.”