would dash out into the road, stop to listen, and dart into the
opposite hedge, all hind-legs and white scut. But, except for these,
he was alone in the world.
And, gradually, there began to be borne in upon him the conviction
that he had lost his way.
It is difficult to judge distance when one is walking, but it
certainly seemed to Jimmy that he must have covered five miles by
this time. He must have mistaken the way. He had doubtless come
straight. He could not have come straighter. On the other hand, it
would be quite in keeping with the cheap substitute which served the
Earl of Dreever in place of a mind that he should have forgotten to
mention some important turning. Jimmy sat down by the roadside.
As he sat, there came to him from down the road the sound of a
horse's feet, trotting. He got up. Here was somebody at last who
would direct him.
The sound came nearer. The horse turned the corner; and Jimmy saw
with surprise that it bore no rider.
"Hullo?" he said. "Accident? And, by Jove, a side-saddle!"
The curious part of it was that the horse appeared in no way a wild
horse. It gave the impression of being out for a little trot on its
own account, a sort of equine constitutional.
Jimmy stopped the horse, and led it back the way it had come. As he
turned the bend in the road, he saw a girl in a riding-habit running
toward him. She stopped running when she caught sight of him, and
slowed down to a walk.
"Thank you ever so much," she said, taking the reins from him.
"Dandy, you naughty old thing! I got off to pick up my crop, and he
ran away."
Jimmy looked at her flushed, smiling face, and stood staring.
It was Molly McEachern.
CHAPTER XII
MAKING A START
Self-possession was one of Jimmy's leading characteristics, but for
the moment he found himself speechless. This girl had been occupying
his thoughts for so long that--in his mind--he had grown very
intimate with her. It was something of a shock to come suddenly out
of his dreams, and face the fact that she was in reality practically
a stranger. He felt as one might with a friend whose memory has been
wiped out. It went against the grain to have to begin again from the
beginning after all the time they had been together.
A curious constraint fell upon him.
"Why, how do you do, Mr. Pitt?" she said, holding out her hand.
Jimmy began to feel better. It was something that she remembered his
name.
"It's like meeting somebody out of a dream," said Molly. "I have
sometimes wondered if you were real. Everything that happened that
night was so like a dream."
Jimmy found his tongue.
"You haven't altered," he said, "you look just the same."
"Well," she laughed, "after all, it's not so long ago, is it?"
He was conscious of a dull hurt. To him, it had seemed years. But he
was nothing to her--just an acquaintance, one of a hundred. But what
more, he asked himself, could he have expected? And with the thought
came consolation. The painful sense of having lost ground left him.
He saw that he had been allowing things to get out of proportion. He
had not lost ground. He had gained it. He had met her again, and she
remembered him. What more had he any right to ask?
"I've crammed a good deal into the time," he explained. "I've been
traveling about a bit since we met."
"Do you live in Shropshire?" asked Molly.
"No. I'm on a visit. At least, I'm supposed to be. But I've lost the
way to the place, and I am beginning to doubt if I shall ever get
there. I was told to go straight on. I've gone straight on, and here
I am, lost in the snow. Do you happen to know whereabouts Dreever
Castle is?"
She laughed.
"Why," she said, "I am staying at Dreever Castle, myself."
"What?"
"So, the first person you meet turns out to be an experienced guide.
You're lucky, Mr. Pitt."
"You're right," said Jimmy slowly, "I am."
"Did you come down with Lord Dreever? He passed me in the car just
as I was starting out. He was with another man and Lady Julia Blunt.
Surely, he didn't make you walk?"
"I offered to walk. Somebody had to. Apparently, he had forgotten to
let them know he was bringing me."
"And then he misdirected you! He's very casual, I'm afraid."
"Inclined that way, perhaps."
"Have you known Lord Dreever long?"
"Since a quarter past twelve last night."
"Last night!"
"We met at the Savoy, and, later, on the Embankment. We looked at
the river together, and told each other the painful stories of our
lives, and this morning he called, and invited me down here."
Molly looked at him with frank amusement.
"You must be a very restless sort of person," she said. "You seem to
do a great deal of moving about."
"I do," said Jimmy. "I can't keep still. I've got the go-fever, like
that man in Kipling's book."
"But he was in love."
"Yes," said Jimmy. "He was. That's the bacillus, you know."
She shot a quick glance at him. He became suddenly interesting to
her. She was at the age of dreams and speculations. From being
merely an ordinary young man with rather more ease of manner than
the majority of the young men she had met, he developed in an
instant into something worthy of closer attention. He took on a
certain mystery and romance. She wondered what sort of girl it was
that he loved. Examining him in the light of this new discovery, she
found him attractive. Something seemed to have happened to put her
in sympathy with him. She noticed for the first time a latent
forcefulness behind the pleasantness of his manner. His self-
possession was the self-possession of the man who has been tried and
has found himself.
At the bottom of her consciousness, too, there was a faint stirring
of some emotion, which she could not analyze, not unlike pain. It
was vaguely reminiscent of the agony of loneliness which she had
experienced as a small child on the rare occasions when her father
had been busy and distrait, and had shown her by his manner that she
was outside his thoughts. This was but a pale suggestion of that
misery; nevertheless, there was a resemblance. It was a rather
desolate, shut-out sensation, half-resentful.
It was gone in a moment. But it had been there. It had passed over
her heart as the shadow of a cloud moves across a meadow in the
summer-time.
For some moments, she stood without speaking. Jimmy did not break
the silence. He was looking at her with an appeal in his eyes. Why
could she not understand? She must understand.
But the eyes that met his were those of a child.
As they stood there, the horse, which had been cropping in a
perfunctory manner at the short grass by the roadside, raised its
head, and neighed impatiently. There was something so human about
the performance that Jimmy and the girl laughed simultaneously. The
utter materialism of the neigh broke the spell. It was a noisy
demand for food.
"Poor Dandy!" said Molly. "He knows he's near home, and he knows
it's his dinner-time."
"Are we near the castle, then?"
"It's a long way round by the road, but we can cut across the
fields. Aren't these English fields and hedges just perfect! I love
them. Of course, I loved America, but--"
"Have you left New York long?" asked Jimmy.
"We came over here about a month after you were at our house."
"You didn't spend much time there, then."
"Father had just made a good deal of money in Wall Street. He must
have been making it when I was on the Lusitania. He wanted to leave