What pleased him most, though, were their early morning rides in Central Park. Mrs. Spaulding had gladly enough placed her horses at his disposal--it was only too good of him to exercise the overfed beasts--and many were his merry canters along the bridle-paths, from which now and then he could catch glimpses of the crowded city that elbowed in on his solitude and gave him a thin, fragmentary feeling of truancy, like a summer runaway who had wandered into sound of the familiar old admonitory school-bell. Cordelia soon formed the habit of joining him in these rides, though for a girl from Kentucky and one who had always made much of her love of horseflesh, she was not a good rider. She explained this by the fact that she had fallen out of practise, for one thing, and for another, that since Firefly, her old Kentucky thoroughbred, had run away with her at home she always felt more or less nervous in the saddle. Hartley took her in hand, accordingly, and coached her at great pains and with much patience, and as she learned to sit more comfortably on her mount her strange fear melted away. As she discovered, too, that the daily gallop in the morning air was bringing more vigor to her limbs and a fresher color to her cheeks, her Southern dislike for all such active exercise soon passed away. Under Hartley's influence she even took to walking, though her first lesson with that somewhat thoughtless instructor left her so fatigued in body and nerve, and with such sadly blistered feet, that she had to keep to her bed for the day following their tramp up and down the entire length of Riverside Drive. But of this Hartley knew nothing. Besides these many hours in the open air together there was an occasional luncheon at Sherry's, and rustling, odorous, subdued _musicales_ and recitals at Mendelssohn Hall, and now and then a supper at the Waldorf after the theater, and a merry four-in-hand load or two during the month to Ardsley, and suburban automobile jaunts, and sufficient things of a like nature to cause Hartley to keep a judicious eye on his engagement list and to question himself no longer as to whether or not he was wringing the color out of life. "Cordelia and you seem to be made for each other," said Mrs. Spaulding at supper one evening in her own dining-room, after a charity dance at the Waldorf. "At one time I actually thought the child would never care for anything but books or what the newspapers were saying about her." Mrs. Spaulding had drunk of her third bottle of champagne, and her voice was not so carefully modulated as it might have been. Cordelia heard the speech with painfully flushing face. "And some day she'll go back to her books again," she said as she swept from the room in a rage. Hartley was giving all his attention to his Madeira jelly. Mrs. Spaulding looked after her with blank and uncomprehending eyes.