“Because I want to ride, and you won’t let me, and I’m jealous.”

“Well, if you mayn’t ride with me, you may drive with Stanistreet.”

“I may drive Captain Stanistreet?”

“Certainly not; Captain Stanistreet may drive you.”

“We’ll see about that,” said Mrs. Nevill Tyson as she left the room.

She soon reappeared, enchantingly pretty again in her laces and furs.

It was a glorious morning, the first thin white frost after a long thaw.  The meet was in front of the Cross-Roads Inn, about a mile out of Drayton Parva.  It was neutral ground, where Farmer Ashby could hold his own with Sir Peter any day, and speech was unfettered.  Somebody remarked that Mrs. Nevill Tyson looked uncommonly happy in the dog-cart; while Tyson spoke to nobody and nobody spoke to him.  Poor devil! he hadn’t at all a pretty look on that queer bleached face of his.  And all the time he kept twisting his horse’s head round in a melancholy sort of way, and backing into things and out of them, fit to make you swear.

She must have noticed something.  They were trotting along, Stanistreet driving, by a road that ran side by side with the fields scoured by the hunt, and Tyson could always be seen going recklessly and alone.  He could ride, he could ride!  His worst enemy never doubted that.

“It’s very odd,” said she, “but the people here don’t seem to like Nevill one bit.  I suppose they’ve never seen anything quite like him before.”

“I very much doubt if they have.”

“I think they’re afraid of him.  Mother is, I know; she blinks when she talks to him.”

“Does she blink when she talks to me?”

“Of course not—­you’re different.”

“I am not her son-in-law, certainly.”

“Do you know, though he’s so much older than me—­I simply shudder when I think he’s thirty-seven—­and so awfully clever, and so bad-tempered, I’m not in the least afraid of him.  And he really has a shocking bad temper.”

“I know it of old.”

“So many nice people have bad tempers.  I think it’s the least horrid fault you can have; because it comes on you when you’re not thinking, and it isn’t your fault at all.”

“No; it is generally some one else’s.”

“I don’t think much of people’s passions myself.  He might have something far worse than that.”

“Most undoubtedly.  He might have atrocious taste in dress, or a tendency to drink.”

“Don’t be silly.  Did you know him when he was young?  I don’t mean to say he isn’t young—­thirty-seven’s young enough for anybody—­I mean when he was young like me?”

“I can’t say.  I doubt if he was ever young—­like you.  But I knew him when he was a boy.”

“So you understand him?”

“Oh, pretty well.  Not always, perhaps.  He’s a difficult subject.”

“Anyhow, you like him?  Don’t you?”

Stanistreet gave a curious hard laugh.