“Before Ida Bellethorne was born, do you mean?” asked the English girl doubtfully.

“Which Ida Bellethorne do you mean?” asked Mr. Gordon, while Betty stared.

“I was thinking of my beautiful black mare.  The darling!  She is seven years old now, Mr. Gordon; but I think that in those seven years enough has happened to me to make me feel three times seven years old.”

“Go ahead, Ida,” said the gentleman cheerfully.  “Tell it in your own way.”

Thus encouraged, the girl began, and she did tell it in her own way.  But it was not a brief way, and both Mr. Gordon and Betty asked questions and that, too, increased the difficulty of Ida’s telling her story.

She had been the only living child of Gwynne Bellethorne, who had been a horse breeder and sometimes a turfman in one of the lower English counties.  She had been motherless since her third birthday.  Her only living relative was her father’s sister, likewise Ida Bellethorne, who had been estranged from her brother for several years and had made her own way on the continent and later in America on the concert stage.

Ida, the present Ida, remembered seeing her aunt but once.  She had come to Bellethorne Park the very week the black mare was foaled.  When they all went out to see the little, awkward, kicking colt in the big box stall, separated from its whinnying mother by a strong barred fence, the owner of the stables had laughingly named the filly after his sister.

“But,” Ida told them, “father told Aunt Ida that the filly was to be my property.  He had, I think, suffered many losses even then.  He made a bill of sale, or something, making the filly over to me; but I was a minor, and after father died my guardian had that bill of sale.  He showed it to me once.  I don’t see how Mr. Bolter could have bought my lovely mare when I got none of the money for her.”

This was not, however, sticking to the main thread of the story.  Ida knew that although her aunt had come to the Park in amity, there was a quarrel between her father and aunt before the haughty and beautiful concert singer went away, never more to appear at Bellethorne, not even to attend her brother’s funeral.

Before that sad happening the mare, Ida Bellethorne, had come to full growth and as a three-year-old had made an astonishing record on the English race tracks.  The year Mr. Bellethorne died he had planned to ship her to France for the Grand Prix.  Her name was in the mouths of every sportsman in England and her fame had spread to the United States.

The death of her father had signaled the breaking up of her home and the severing of all home ties for Ida.  Like many men of his class, Mr. Bellethorne had had no close friends.  At least, no honorable friends.  The man he had chosen as the administrator of his wrecked estate and the guardian of his unfortunate daughter, Ida felt sure had been dishonorable.

There seemed nothing left for Ida when the estate was “settled.”  One day Ida Bellethorne, the mare, had disappeared, and Ida the girl could learn nothing about her or what had been done with her.  At that she had run away from her guardian, had made her way to Liverpool, had taken service with an American family sailing for the United States, and so had reached New York.