When music and conversation palled, they went for long gallops
over the prairies together. Tannis rode to perfection, and
managed her bad-tempered brute of a pony with a skill and grace
that made Carey applaud her. She was glorious on horseback.
Sometimes he grew tired of the prairies and then he and Tannis
paddled themselves over the river in Nitchie Joe's dug-out, and
landed on the old trail that struck straight into the wooded belt
of the Saskatchewan valley, leading north to trading posts on the
frontier of civilization. There they rambled under huge pines,
hoary with the age of centuries, and Carey talked to Tannis about
England and quoted poetry to her. Tannis liked poetry; she had
studied it at school, and understood it fairly well. But once
she told Carey that she thought it a long, round-about way of
saying what you could say just as well in about a dozen plain
words. Carey laughed. He liked to evoke those little speeches
of hers. They sounded very clever, dropping from such arched,
ripely-tinted lips.
If you had told Carey that he was playing with fire he would have
laughed at you. In the first place he was not in the slightest
degree in love with Tannis--he merely admired and liked her. In
the second place, it never occurred to him that Tannis might be
in love with him. Why, he had never attempted any love-making
with her! And, above all, he was obsessed with that aforesaid
fatal idea that Tannis was like the women he had associated with
all his life, in reality as well as in appearance.
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