He had gathered his own horse, and was galloping. Hers insisted on following. When George pulled in to keep at her side they were well in advance of the others. Now that he was alone with her he found it difficult to speak, and evidently she would limit his opportunity, for as he drew in she spurred her horse. He caught her, laughing. "You may as well understand that I'll never ride behind you again." She pressed her provocative lips together. So in silence, except for the crunching and scattering of the snow, they tore on through the dusk, rounding curves between hedges, rising to heights above bare, white stretches of landscape, dipping into hollows already won by the night. And each moment they came nearer the house. In the night of the hollows he battled his desire to reach over and touch her, and cry out: "Sylvia! You've got to understand!" And in one such place her horse stumbled, and she pulled in and bent low over her saddle, and said, as if he had really spoken: "I can't understand----" Her outline was blurred, but her face was like a light in that shadowed valley. He didn't speak until they were up the hill and the wind had caught them. "What?" he asked then. Was it the glow, offered by the white earth rather than the sky, that made him fancy her lips quivered? "Why you always try to hurt me." He thought of her broken riding crop, of her attempts to hurt him every time he had seen her since the day she had tried to cut him with it. A single exception clung to his memory--the night of Betty's dance, years ago, when she had failed to remember him. Her words, therefore, carried a thrill, a colour of surrender, since from the very first she had made him attack for his own defence. "That's an odd thing for you to say." There were lights ahead, accents in the closing night for Blodgett's huge and ugly extravagance. They rode slowly up the drive. "Will you ever stop following me? Will you ever leave me alone?" He stared at her, answering softly: "It is impossible I should ever leave you alone." At the terrace he sprang down, tossed his reins to a groom, and went to her, raising his hands. For a moment she looked at him, hesitating. There were two grooms. So she took his hands and leapt down. It was a quick, uncertain touch her fingers gave him. "Thanks," she said, and crossed the terrace at his side. That moment, he reflected, was in itself culminating, yet he couldn't dismiss the feeling that their relations approached a larger climax. All the better, since things couldn't very well go on as they were. Was it that fleeting contact that had altered him, or her companionship in the gray night? He only knew as he walked close to her that the bitterness in his heart had diminished. He was willing to relinquish the return blow if she would ease the hurt she had given him. He told himself that she had never been nearer. An odd fancy!