When Bo got into the saddle Dale continued: "You went up quick an' light, but the wrong way. Watch me."
Bo had to mount several times before Dale was satisfied. Then he told her to ride off a little distance. When Bo had gotten out of earshot Dale said to Helen: "She'll take to a horse like a duck takes to water." Then, mounting, he rode out after her.
Helen watched them trotting and galloping and running the horses round the grassy park, and rather regretted she had not gone with them. Eventually Bo rode back, to dismount and fling herself down, red-cheeked and radiant, with disheveled hair, and curls damp on her temples. How alive she seemed! Helen's senses thrilled with the grace and charm and vitality of this surprising sister, and she was aware of a sheer physical joy in her presence. Bo rested, but she did not rest long. She was soon off to play with Bud. Then she coaxed the tame doe to eat out of her hand. She dragged Helen off for wild flowers, curious and thoughtless by turns. And at length she fell asleep, quickly, in a way that reminded Helen of the childhood now gone forever.
Dale called them to dinner about four o'clock, as the sun was reddening the western rampart of the park. Helen wondered where the day had gone. The hours had flown swiftly, serenely, bringing her scarcely a thought of her uncle or dread of her forced detention there or possible discovery by those outlaws supposed to be hunting for her. After she realized the passing of those hours she had an intangible and indescribable feeling of what Dale had meant about dreaming the hours away. The nature of Paradise Park was inimical to the kind of thought that had habitually been hers. She found the new thought absorbing, yet when she tried to name it she found that, after all, she had only felt. At the meal hour she was more than usually quiet. She saw that Dale noticed it and was trying to interest her or distract her attention. He succeeded, but she did not choose to let him see that. She strolled away alone to her seat under the pine. Bo passed her once, and cried, tantalizingly: "My, Nell, but you're growing romantic!"
Never before in Helen's life had the beauty of the evening star seemed so exquisite or the twilight so moving and shadowy or the darkness so charged with loneliness. It was their environment--the accompaniment of wild wolf-mourn, of the murmuring waterfall, of this strange man of the forest and the unfamiliar elements among which he made his home.