“With your kind permission, Lady Louise, I will save him the trouble,” answered Sir Everard Kingsland.  “Grosvenor is not singular in his wish, but I never gave him credit for so much good taste before.”

“Mr. Grosvenor is more at home in the hunting-field than the drawing-room, I fancy.  Apropos, Sir Everard, I ride to the meet to-morrow.  Of course you will be present on your ‘bonny bay’ to display your prowess?”

“Of course—­a fox-hunt is to me a foretaste of celestial bliss.  With a first-rate horse, a crack pack of hounds, a ‘good scent,’ and a fine morning, a man is tempted to wish life could last forever.  And you are only going to ride to the meet, then, Lady Louise?”

“Yes; I never followed the hounds, I don’t know the country and I can’t ride to points.  Besides, I am not really Amazonian enough to fancy a scamper across the country, flying fences and risking my precious neck.”

“I must own that, to me, a lady never looks less attractive than in a hunting-field, among yelping hounds, and shouts, and cheers, and cords and tops, and scarlet coats.”

“That comes of being a poet and an artist; and Sir Everard Kingsland is accused of being both.  You want to fancy us all angels, and you can not reconcile an angelic being with a side-saddle and a hard gallop.  Now, I don’t own to being anything in the Di Vernon line myself, and I don’t wish to be; but I do think a pretty girl never looks half so pretty as when well mounted.  You should have seen Harrie Hunsden, as I saw her the other day, and you would surely recant your heresy about ladies and horse-flesh.”

“Is Harrie Hunsden a lady?”

“Certainly.  Don’t you know her?  She is Captain Hunsden’s only daughter—­Hunsden, of Hunsden Hall, one of your oldest Devon families.  You’ll find them duly chronicled in Burke and Debrett.  Miss Hunsden is scarcely eighteen, but she has been over the world—­from Quebec to Gibraltar—­from Halifax to Calcutta.  Two years of her life she passed at a New York boarding-school, of which city her mother was a native.”

“Indeed!” Sir Everard said, just lifting his eyebrows.  “And Miss Hunsden rides well?”

“Like Di Vernon’s self.”

“Is your Miss Hunsden pretty? and shall we see her at the meet to-morrow?”

“Yes to both questions; and more than at the meet, I fancy.  She and her thorough-bred, Whirlwind, will lead you all.  Her scarlet habit and ‘red roan steed’ are as well known in the country as the duke’s hounds, and her bright eyes and dashing style have taken by storm the hearts of half the fox-hunting squires of Devonshire.”

She laughed a little maliciously.  Truth to tell, not being quite sure that her game was safely wired, and dreading this Amazonian Miss Hunsden as a prospective rival, she was nothing loath to prejudice the fastidious young baronet beforehand, even while seeming to praise her.

“I am surprised that you have not heard of her,” she said.  “Sir Harcourt Helford and Mr. Cholmondeley actually fought a duel about her, and it ended in her telling them to their faces they were a pair of idiots, and flatly refusing both.  ‘The Hunsden’ is the toast of the country.”