“Don't be silly, Val!” Fleetwood did not mean to be rude, but a faint glimmer of her romantic viewpoint--a viewpoint gained chiefly from current fiction and the stage--came to him and contrasted rather brutally with the reality. He did not know how to make her understand, without incriminating himself. His letters had been rather idealistic, he admitted to himself. They had been written unthinkingly, because he wanted her to like this big land; naturally he had not been too baldly truthful in picturing the place and the people. He had passed lightly over their faults and thrown the limelight on their virtues; and so he had aided unwittingly the stage and the fiction she had read, in giving her a false impression. Offended at his words and his tone, she drew away from him and glanced wistfully back toward the town, as if she meditated a haughty return to the hotel. She ended by seating herself upon a projecting tie. “Oh, very well, my lord,” she retorted, “I shall try and not be silly, but merely idiotic, as you would have me. You and your friend!” She was very angry, but she was perfectly well-bred, she hoped. “If I might venture a word,” she began again ironically, “it seems to me that your friend has been playing a practical joke upon you. He evidently has no intention of bringing any fleet steeds to us. No doubt he is at this moment laughing with his dissolute companions, because we are sitting out here in the dark like two silly chickens!” “I think he's coming now,” Manley said rather stiffly. “Of course, I don't ask you to like him; but he's putting himself to a good deal of trouble for us, and--” “Wasted effort, so far as I am concerned,” Valeria put in, with a chirpy accent which was exasperating, even to a bridegroom very much in love with his bride. In the darkness that muffled the land, save where the yellow flare of lamps in the little town made a misty brightness, came the click of shod hoofs. Another moment and a man, mounted upon a white horse, loomed indistinct before them, seeming to take substance from the night. Behind him trailed another horse, and for the first time in her life Valeria heard the soft, whispering creak of saddle leather, the faint clank of spur chains, and the whir of a horse mouthing the “cricket” in his bit. Even in her anger, she was conscious of an answering tingle of blood, because this was life in the raw--life such as she had dreamed of in the tight swaddlings of a smug civilization, and had longed for intensely. Kent swung down close beside them, his form indistinct but purposeful. “I'm late, I guess,” he remarked, turning to Fleetwood. “Fred got next, somehow, and--I was detained.” “Where is he?” asked Manley, going up and laying a questioning hand upon the horse, by that means fully recognizing it as Kent's own.