affair of every day. They were walking their horses; the groom followed
stolidly behind.

Armitage was silent, a look of great perplexity on his face. When he
spoke he was quite calm.

"Miss Claiborne, I must tell you that this is an affair in which I can't
ask help in the usual channels. You will pardon me if I seem to make a
mystery of what should be ordinarily a bit of business between myself and
the police; but to give publicity to these attempts to injure me just now
would be a mistake. I could have caught that man there in the wood; but I
let him go, for the reason--for the reason that I want the men back of
him to show themselves before I act. But if it isn't presuming--"

He was quite himself again. His voice was steady and deep with the ease
and assurance that she liked in him. She had marked to-day in his
earnestness, more than at any other time, a slight, an almost
indistinguishable trace of another tongue in his English.

"How am I to know whether it would be presuming?" she asked.

"But I was going to say--"

"When rudely interrupted!" She was trying to make it easy for him to say
whatever he wished.

"--that these troubles of mine are really personal. I have committed no
crime and am not fleeing from justice."

She laughed and urged her horse into a gallop for a last stretch of road