Roger’s face lightened, eagerly.

“Oh, then I hope you’re staying at Mallow till the hunting season starts?  I’ve a lovely mare I could lend you if you’d let me.”

Nan shook her head and made a hasty gesture of dissent.

“Oh, no, no.  Quite honestly, I’ve not ridden for years—­and even if I took up riding once more I should never hunt again.  I think”—­she shrank a little—­“it’s too cruel.”

Trenby regarded her with ingenuous amazement.

“Cruel!” he exclaimed.  “Why, it’s sport!”

“Magic word!” Nan’s lips curled a little.  “You say it’s ‘sport’ as though that made it all right.”

“So it does,” answered Trenby contentedly.

“It may—­for the sportsman.  But as far as the fox is concerned, it’s sheer cruelty.”

Trenby drove on without speaking for a short time.  Then he said slowly: 

“Well, in a way I suppose you’re right.  But, all the same, it’s the sporting instinct—­the cultivated sporting instinct—­which has made the Englishman what he is.  It’s that which won the war, you know.”

“It’s a big price to pay.  Couldn’t you”—­a sudden charming smile curving her lips—­“couldn’t you do it—­I mean cultivate the sporting instinct—­by polo and things like that?”

“It’s not the same.”  Trenby shook his head.  “You don’t understand.  It’s the desire to find your quarry, to go through anything rather than to let him beat you—­no matter how done or tired you feel.”

“It may be very good for you,” allowed Nan.  “But it’s very bad luck on the fox.  I wouldn’t mind so much if he had fair play.  But even if he succeeds in getting away from you—­beating you, in fact—­and runs to earth, you proceed to dig him out.  I call that mean.”

Trenby was silent again for a moment.  Then he asked suddenly: 

“What would you do if your husband hunted?”

“Put up with it, I suppose, just as I should put up with his other faults—­if I loved him.”

Roger made no answer but quickened the speed of the car, letting her race over the level surface of the road, and when next he spoke it was on some quite other topic.

Half an hour later a solid-looking grey house, built in the substantial Georgian fashion and surrounded by trees, came into view.  Roger slowed up as the car passed the gates which guarded the entrance to the drive.

“That’s Trenby Hall,” he said.  And Nan was conscious of an impishly amused feeling that just so might Noah, when the Flood began, have announced:  “That’s my Ark.’”

“You’ve never been over yet,” continued Roger.  “But I want you to come one day.  I should like you to meet my mother.”

A queer little dart of fear shot through her as he spoke.

She felt as though she were being gradually hemmed in.

“It looks a beautiful place,” she answered conventionally, though inwardly thinking how she would loathe to live in a solid, square mansion of that type, prosaically dull and shut away from the world by enclosing woods.