There was an instant of petrifaction.  “Diddlety—­iddlety—­idlety!” chanted the waiter with far-away sweetness.

Fanny Fitz and the ostler were outside the gate simultaneously:  the filly was already rounding the first turn of the road; two strides more, and she was gone as though she had never been, and “Oh, my nineteen pounds!” thought poor Fanny Fitz.

As the ostler was wont to say in subsequent repetitions of the story:  “Thanks be to God, the reins was rotten!” But for this it is highly probable that Miss Fitzroy’s speculation would have collapsed abruptly with broken knees, possibly with a broken neck.  Having galloped into them in the course of the first hundred yards, they fell from her as the green withes fell from Samson, one long streamer alone remaining to lash her flanks as she fled.  Some five miles from the hotel she met a wedding, and therewith leaped the bog-drain by the side of the road and “took to the mountains,” as the bridegroom poetically described it to Fanny Fitz, who, with the ostler, was pursuing the fugitive on an outside car.

“If that’s the way,” said the ostler, “ye mightn’t get her again before the winther.”

Fanny Fitz left the matter, together with a further instalment of the thirty pounds, in the hands of the sergeant of police, and went home, and, improbable as it may appear, in the course of something less than ten days she received an invoice from the local railway station, Enniscar, briefly stating:  “1 horse arrd.  Please remove.”

Many people, most of her friends indeed, were quite unaware that Fanny Fitz possessed a home.  Beyond the fact that it supplied her with a permanent address, and a place at which she was able periodically to deposit consignments of half-worn-out clothes, Fanny herself was not prone to rate the privilege very highly.  Possibly, two very elderly maiden step-aunts are discouraging to the homing instinct; the fact remained that as long as the youngest Miss Fitzroy possessed the where-withal to tip a housemaid she was but rarely seen within the decorous precincts of Craffroe Lodge.

Let it not for a moment be imagined that the Connemara filly was to become a member of this household.  Even Fanny Fitz, with all her optimism, knew better than to expect that William O’Loughlin, who divided his attentions between the ancient cob and the garden, and ruled the elder Misses Fitzroy with a rod of iron, would undertake the education of anything more skittish than early potatoes.  It was to the stable, or rather cow-house, of one Johnny Connolly, that the new purchase was ultimately conveyed, and it was thither that Fanny Fitz, with apples in one pocket and sugar in the other, conducted her ally, Mr. Freddy Alexander, the master of the Craffroe Hounds.  Fanny Fitz’s friendship with Freddy was one of long standing, and was soundly based on the fact that when she had been eighteen he had been fourteen; and though it may be admitted that this is a discrepancy that somewhat fades with time, even Freddy’s mother acquitted Fanny Fitz of any ulterior motive; and Freddy was an only son.