Armitage came again to her mind. He had called at the Claiborne house
twice since the Secretary's ball, and she had been surprised to find how
fully she accepted him as an American, now that he was on her own soil.
He derived, too, a certain stability from the fact that the Sandersons
knew him; he was, indeed, an entirely different person since the Montana
Senator definitely connected him with an American landscape. She had kept
her own counsel touching the scene on the dark deck of the _King Edward_,
but it was not a thing lightly to be forgotten. She was half angry with
herself this mellow afternoon to find how persistently Armitage came into
her thoughts, and how the knife-thrust on the steamer deck kept recurring
in her mind and quickening her sympathy for a man of whom she knew
so little; and she touched her horse impatiently with the crop and rode
into the park at a gait that roused the groom to attention.
At a bend of the road Chauvenet and Franzel, the attache, swung into
view, mounted, and as they met, Chauvenet turned his horse and rode
beside her.
"Ah, these American airs! This spring! Is it not good to be alive, Miss
Claiborne?"
"It is all of that!" she replied.
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