The quiet repose of a lady-like English girl gained by the contrast.  There was rather too much tranquillity to-day, perhaps; so he exerted some tact to draw Cecil from her reserve, the cause of which he was unable to guess.  He agreed with her in reviling the monotony and stupidity of sleighing picnics, having to follow one by one like a string of geese, long after one was perished with cold, though he failed to detect in her weariness that she was wishing for her father to stop at the Tremaines’, and annex the truant sleigh to the rest.

Her discontent somewhat relieved by expression, she became ashamed of her unsociability, and Major Fane’s next topic was not uncongenial.  He was airing his cherished grudge, and pronouncing a severe philippic on the belles of the Dominion.  Cecil was incapable of detraction, or envy at another’s greater success; but in the face of Bertie’s abduction of Lilla before her eyes, she did not feel particularly in charity with any daughter of Canada.

In the meantime Bluebell, in the strangest of spirits, refused to relinquish the reins, even in difficult places, and conducted herself generally with a mixture of recklessness and ignorance that gave Jack enough to do to look out.

He rather took advantage of this mood to make more decided love than he had hitherto done; but while he thought her wild with fun and spirits, she was really goaded on by vexation and bitterness of heart; and perhaps her most immediate wish was for solitude to drop the mask and be miserable in peace.

That was impossible, at present.  Jack was tiresome.  He was giving her directions how to steer up a hill, formidable from its narrow track and deep drop on either side.  Dahlia, it seemed, jibbed sometimes, she must—­Bluebell was paying no attention.  Good Heavens! what was happening?—­the leader backing and sliding!  Jack’s stinging whip and clutch at the reins could not arrest the catastrophe.  Dahlia rears and falls over the edge, pulling sleigh and wheeler after her into a trough of snow.

Bluebell blinded and half suffocated—­no wonder, for three bear-skins and two cushions were a-top of her (not to mention Jack, who had caught his leg in the reins, and was unable immediately to rise),—­made vain efforts to extricate himself; the horses were struggling on their sides; and altogether, as the Americans say, it was rather “mixed.”

Somehow or another, no one ever does get hurt out of a sleigh, even after an impromptu header of a dozen feet.  Ten minutes later the party were en route again, Bluebell transferred, en penitence, to Colonel Rolleston’s sleigh, vice the subaltern; and by this time nearly every one was discontented and anxious to return.

CHAPTER VIII.

FIXING UP A PRANCE.

“’Tis over,
The valse, the quadrille, and the song,
The whispered farewell of the lover;
The heartless adieu of the throng,
The heart that was throbbing with pleasure;
The eyelid that longed for repose,
The beaux that were dreaming of treasure. 
The girls that were dreaming of beaux.” 
—­Edward Firzgerald.