“By Jove!” said Dinny Johnny, and was silent.  I believe that was the moment at which the identity of the future Mrs. Denny was made clear to him.

“And you’ll have to ride her in my saddle!” went on Mary at lightning speed, taking control of the situation in a manner prophetic of her future successful career as a matron.  “There isn’t time to change—­”

“The devil I shall!” said Dinny Johnny, and an unworthy thought of what his friends would say flitted across his mind.

“And you’ll have to sit sideways, because the lowest crutch is so far back there’s not room for your leg if you sit saddleways,” continued his preceptor breathlessly.  “I know it—­Jimmy said so when he rode her to the meet for me last week.  Oh hurry—­hurry!  How slow you are!”

Mr. Denny never quite knew how he got into the horrors of the saddle, still less how he and “Matchbox” got into the road.  At one acute moment, indeed, he had believed he was going to precede her thither, but they alighted more or less together, and turning her, by a handy gap, into the field on the other side of the road, he set off at a precarious gallop, followed by the encouraging shrieks of Mary.

“Thank the Lord there’s no one looking, and it’s a decent old saddle with a pommel on the offside,” he said to himself piously, while he grasped the curving snout of the pommel in question, “I’d be a dead man this minute only for that.”

He felt as though he were wedged in among the claws of a giant crab, but without the sense of retention that might be hoped for under such circumstances.  The lowest crutch held one leg in aching durance; there was but just room for the other between the two upper horns, and the saddle was so short and hollow in the seat that its high-ridged cantle was the only portion from which he derived any support—­a support that was suddenly and painfully experienced after each jump.  He could see, very far off, the pink coat of “Owld Sta’” following a line which seemed each moment to be turning more directly for Madore, and in his agony he gave the pony an imprudent dig of the spur that sent her on and off a boggy fence in two goat-like bounds, and gave the sunlight opportunity to play intermittently upon the hollow seat of the saddle.  She had never carried him so well, and as she put her little head down and raced at the fences, the unfortunate Dinny Johnny felt that though he was probably going to break his neck, no one would ever be able to mention his early demise without a grin.

Field after field fled by him in painful succession till he found himself safe on the farther side of a big stone-faced “double,” the last fence before the river.

“Please God I’ll never be a woman again!” ejaculated Mr. Denny as he wedged his left leg more tightly in behind the torturing leaping horn, “that was a hairy old place!  I wish Mary saw the pair of us coming up on to it like new-born stags!”