sharply.

"What is it?" she asked, drawing bridle in her turn and looking back
into his white, stupefied face.

"Pain," he said, unconscious that he spoke. At the same instant the
stunned eyes found their focus--and found her beside his stirrup,
leaning wide from her seat in sweet concern, one gloved hand resting on
the pommel of his saddle.

"Are you ill?" she asked; "shall we dismount? If you feel dizzy, please
lean against me."

"I am all right," he said coolly; and as she recovered her seat he set
his horse in motion. His face had become very red now; he looked at her,
then beyond her, with all the deliberate concentration of aloof
indifference.

Confused, conscious that something had happened which she did not
comprehend, and sensitively aware of the preoccupation which, if it did
not ignore her, accepted her presence as of no consequence, she
permitted her horse to set his own pace.

Neither self-command nor self-control was lacking now in Selwyn; he
simply was too self-absorbed to care what she thought--whether she
thought at all. And into his consciousness, throbbing heavily under the
rushing reaction from shock, crowded the crude fact that Alixe was no
longer an apparition evoked in sleeplessness, in sun-lit brooding;
in the solitude of crowded avenues and swarming streets; she
was an actual presence again in his life--she was here, bodily,