Edward led his horse around them and, after a swift survey that convinced him that they would be well screened, dropped the bridle. Carefully and attentively, as if she were fragile, he helped Ann down to the rock, and Ann, who had sprung down that morning as nimbly as a chamois, lent herself daintily to his guidance, instantly adapting herself to it, enjoying it. This was something quite new to her, as new as Baird's impetuosity or Garvin's restrained passion. And she took, quite as her due, the step-like ridge in the rock that seated Edward at her feet. She was neither embarrassed nor awed, partly because of Edward's well sustained ease and deference, partly because of his very evident interest in every word she uttered. With a skill which Ann was not experienced enough to recognize, he led her to talk of the farm, then of her people, then of herself. He had been away so long, he told her. He had been everywhere--except at Westmore--much of the time in Europe; everything she told him was news. He drew from her an accurate picture of her life as it had been from her earliest remembrance and as it was now, and that without any such passionate outburst as she had visited upon Garvin. With his knowledge of her family and his growing knowledge of her, it was easy to read between the lines. She was apart from her family; she was not happy with them. Whether she had attained to seventeen years without a romance was the one point upon which he was uncertain; even a very young girl would know how to guard that secret. Ann could not know that she was being manipulated by a master-hand. When he looked up at her, his eyes held only pleased interest. When he looked down at the resentful, quarreling water and they were hidden from her, his expression was different. Edward Westmore's combination of ease and impenetrable reserve, of swift intelligence and yet guarded speech, the melancholy that shadowed him, like a thin veil drawn over a smile, had baffled more astute people than Ann. It had made him a noticeable man wherever he had gone; a man of acknowledged charm and suspected subtlety. His family had known him as a spirited and yet dependable boy, the most dependable of the Westmores, until the upheaval which had sent him away from his home had revealed passions his family had not suspected. He had demanded a release from Westmore and Westmore conditions and had gained it. That he had married beyond all expectations well a woman older than himself and possessed of a fortune, and had settled into the inscrutable man he was, with the welfare of Westmore apparently his closest interest, was one of the inexplicable things about him.