He found himself studying her as a botanist studies a flower. In their loneliness they dwelt as on a desert island. But she could ride a little and he had good saddle horses, and she found many occasions for excursions to White Plains. They rode often together up to the Northcastle post office, where the stage flung off the New York papers and the letters. She had a brave beauty as she rode, her long skirt like a spinnaker at the horse’s flank, her veil flying from her hat, her silhouette one with the horse’s back, where her arched thigh rose above it and clasped the saddle horn. The news from the city was blacker every day, and she was more and more content with her exile, until a letter came to tell her that Harry Chalender had not died after all, but had somehow won his duel with the Asiatic death. The same post brought her word that her father had also passed the crisis. She made a great noise of delight in the recovery of her father. But she said nothing more of Harry Chalender. And so his name rang aloud in the back of RoBards’ mind. He was hard to please: if she had exclaimed upon Chalender’s escape he would have winced. Yet her silence was unendurable. In a ferocious quarrel that began in nothing at all, and was, on his part, only the outcry of a love too exacting, because it was too hungry, she flung at him: “I needn’t have married you, Mist’ RoBards! You made me. You kept at me.” “Hush, sweetheart!” he pleaded, “you don’t want the servants to hear.” “What do I care for servants? If I hadn’t been such a fool as to listen to you, I might have married Harry Chalender.” “Hush!” he stormed, “or, by——” “By who, what?” she screamed, staring up at him as if in desire as in need of a beating. When he could not smite such beauty, she cried at him: “This house! This terrible tomb! My father would have called it this damned house. Well, it’s nothing but a madhouse to me, one of those places where they lock people up so that they may go insane really.” He choked. It was bad enough for a lady to swear, for his wife of all ladies to swear, but there was a sacrilege in her curse upon this home. This anathema and this bridal rebellion must be kept secret. Walls had ears but no lips to speak. Servants, however, had both long ears and large mouths; and negroes were blabbers. And so for the sake of quiet, he crushed back his own wrath and his sense of her wickedness, and fell on his knees before her, imploring pardon as an idolater might prostrate himself before a shrine whence he received only divine outrage and injustice. And she was appeased by his surrender! And lifted him up in her arms amorously! He resented her caresses more than her cruelty, but he preferred them because they were private and murmurous. He had an inherited passion for secrecy.