Thus, in these days, he rode for his exercise while the sun still lay behind the ocean; and thus her lively, pointed face and wide blue eyes, wondering or downcast or merry, were mingled in his thoughts with the first rousing of the world, the beat of hoofs in cool silences, the wide lights of creation over an aged, weary, alien empire.  Their ponies whinnying like old friends, they met, by chance or appointment, before the power of sleep had lifted from eyes still new and strange against the morning.  Sometimes Chantel the handsome rode glowering beside them, sometimes Gilly, erect and solid in the saddle, laid upon their talk all the weight of his honest, tired commonplaces.

But one morning she cantered up alone, laughing at her escape.  His pony bolted, and they raced along together as comrades happily join forces in a headlong dream.  Quivering bamboo swept behind them; the river, on their other hand, met and passed in hurrying panorama.  They had no time for words, but only laughter.  Words, indeed, had never yet advanced them beyond that moment on the pagoda.  And now, when their ponies fell into a shambling trot, came the first impulse of speech.

“How lucky!” she cried.  “How lucky we came this way!  Now I can really test you!”

He turned.  Her glowing face was now averted, her gesture was not for him, but for the scene.  He studied that, to understand her.

The river, up which they had fled, now rested broad and quiet as a shallow lake, burnished faintly, brooded over by a floating, increasing light, not yet compounded into day.  Tussocks, innumerable clods and crumbs of vivid green, speckled all the nearer water.  On some of these storks meditated,—­sage, pondering heads and urbane bodies perched high on the frailest penciling of legs.  In the whole expanse, no movement came but when a distant bird, leaving his philosophic pose, plunged downward after a fish.  Beyond them rose a shapeless mound or isle, like some half-organic monster grounded in his native ooze.

“There!” said the woman, pointing.  “Are you all excuses, like the others?  Or do you dare?”

“I am not afraid of anything—­now,” retorted Rudolph, and with truth, after the dash of their twilight encounter.  “Dare what?”

“Go see what’s on that island,” she answered.  “I dared them all.  Twice I’ve seen natives land there and hurry away.  Mr. Nesbit was too lazy to try; Dr. Chantel wearing his best clothes.  Maurice Heywood refused to mire his horse for a whim.  Whim?  It’s a mystery!  Come, now.  Do you dare?”

In a rare flush of pride, Rudolph wheeled his stubborn mount and bullied him down the bank.  A poor horseman, he would have outstripped Curtius to the gulf.  But no sooner had his dancing pony consented to make the first rebellious, sidelong plunge, than he had small joy of his boast.  Fore-legs sank floundering, were hoisted with a terrified wrench of the shoulders, in the same moment that hind-legs went down as by suction.