“My thoughts were of you,” Chris answered, and felt the responsive pressure of the hand that rested on his arm.

She turned her face up to his and met his lips.

“Good night,” she said.

“Dear Lute, dear Lute,” he caressed her with his voice as she moved away among the shadows.

* * *

“Who’s going for the mail?” called a woman’s voice through the trees.

Lute closed the book from which they had been reading, and sighed.

“We weren’t going to ride to-day,” she said.

“Let me go,” Chris proposed.  “You stay here.  I’ll be down and back in no time.”

She shook her head.

“Who’s going for the mail?” the voice insisted.

“Where’s Martin?” Lute called, lifting her voice in answer.

“I don’t know,” came the voice.  “I think Robert took him along somewhere—­horse-buying, or fishing, or I don’t know what.  There’s really nobody left but Chris and you.  Besides, it will give you an appetite for dinner.  You’ve been lounging in the hammock all day.  And Uncle Robert must have his newspaper.”

“All right, Aunty, we’re starting,” Lute called back, getting out of the hammock.

A few minutes later, in riding-clothes, they were saddling the horses.  They rode out on to the county road, where blazed the afternoon sun, and turned toward Glen Ellen.  The little town slept in the sun, and the somnolent storekeeper and postmaster scarcely kept his eyes open long enough to make up the packet of letters and newspapers.

An hour later Lute and Chris turned aside from the road and dipped along a cow-path down the high bank to water the horses, before going into camp.

“Dolly looks as though she’d forgotten all about yesterday,” Chris said, as they sat their horses knee-deep in the rushing water.  “Look at her.”

The mare had raised her head and cocked her ears at the rustling of a quail in the thicket.  Chris leaned over and rubbed around her ears.  Dolly’s enjoyment was evident, and she drooped her head over against the shoulder of his own horse.

“Like a kitten,” was Lute’s comment.

“Yet I shall never be able wholly to trust her again,” Chris said.  “Not after yesterday’s mad freak.”

“I have a feeling myself that you are safer on Ban,” Lute laughed.  “It is strange.  My trust in Dolly is as implicit as ever.  I feel confident so far as I am concerned, but I should never care to see you on her back again.  Now with Ban, my faith is still unshaken.  Look at that neck!  Isn’t he handsome!  He’ll be as wise as Dolly when he is as old as she.”

“I feel the same way,” Chris laughed back.  “Ban could never possibly betray me.”

They turned their horses out of the stream.  Dolly stopped to brush a fly from her knee with her nose, and Ban urged past into the narrow way of the path.  The space was too restricted to make him return, save with much trouble, and Chris allowed him to go on.  Lute, riding behind, dwelt with her eyes upon her lover’s back, pleasuring in the lines of the bare neck and the sweep out to the muscular shoulders.