“I’ve a good mind to let ’em go,” said he sulkily as he walked over to the stables of the inn.  “The notion of a man having to set out on this wild-goose chase at this time o’ night!  Run away, have they? and what in all the world have they run away for?”

It occurred to him, however, that the sooner he got a horse saddled and set out, the less distance he would have to go in pursuit; and that consideration quickened his movements.

“What’s it all about?” said he to Roscorla, who had followed him into the stable.

“I suppose they mean a runaway match,” said Mr. Roscorla, helping to saddle George Rosewarne’s cob, a famous trotter.

“It’s that young devil’s limb, Mabyn, I’ll be bound,” said the father.  “I wish to Heaven somebody would marry her!—­I don’t care who.  She’s always up to some confounded mischief.”

“No, no, no,” Roscorla said:  “it’s Wenna he means to marry.”

“Why, you were to have married Wenna?”

“Yes, but—­”

“Then why didn’t you?  So she’s run away, has she?” George Rosewarne grinned:  he saw how the matter lay.

“This is Mabyn’s work, I know,” said he as he put his foot in the stirrup and sprang into the saddle.  “You’d better go home, Roscorla.  Don’t you say a word to anybody.  You don’t want the girl made a fool of all through the place.”

So George Rosewarne set out to bring back his daughters; not galloping, as an anxious parent might, but going ahead with a long, steady-going trot, which he knew would soon tell on Mrs. Trelyon’s over-fed and under-exercised horses.

“If they mean Plymouth,” he was thinking, “as is most likely from their taking the high-road, he’ll give it them gently at first.  And so that young man wants to marry our Wenna?  ’Twould be a fine match for her; and yet she’s worth all the money he’s got—­she’s worth it every farthing.  I’d give him the other one cheap enough.”

Pounding along a dark road, with the consciousness that the farther you go the farther you’ve got to get back, and that the distance still to be done is an indeterminate quantity, is agreeable to no one, but it was especially vexatious to George Rosewarne, who liked to take things quietly, and could not understand what all the fuss was about.  Why should he be sent on this mad chase at midnight?  If anybody wanted to marry either of the girls, why didn’t he do so and say no more about it?  Rosewarne had been merely impatient and annoyed when he set out, but the longer he rode, and the more he communed with himself, the deeper grew his sense of the personal injury that had been done him by this act of folly.

It was a very lonely ride indeed.  There was not a human being abroad at that hour.  When he passed a few cottages from time to time the windows were dark.  Then they had just been putting down a lot of loose stones at several parts of the road, which caused Mr. Rosewarne to swear.  “I’ll bet a sovereign,” said he to himself, “that old Job kept them a quarter of an hour before he opened Paddock’s Gate.  I believe the old fool goes to bed.  Well, they’ve waked him up for me, any way.”