The filly trembled and sidled away from the garden-seat up to which Johnny Connolly had manoeuvred her.  Johnny’s supreme familiarity with young horses had brought him to the same point of recklessness that Fanny had arrived at from the opposite extreme, but some lingering remnant of prudence had induced him to put on the cavesson headstall, with the long rope attached to it, over the filly’s bridle.  The latter bore with surprising nerve Fanny’s depositing of herself in the saddle.

“I’ll keep a holt o’ the rope, Miss Fanny,” said Johnny, assiduously fondling his pupil; “it might be she’d be strange in herself for the first offer.  I’ll lead her on a small piece.  Come on, gerr’l!  Come on now!”

The pupil, thus adjured, made a hesitating movement, and Fanny settled herself down into the saddle.  It was the shifting of the weight that seemed to bring home to the grey filly the true facts of the case, and with the discovery she shot straight up into the air as if she had been fired from a mortar.  The rope whistled through Johnny Connolly’s fingers, and the point of the filly’s shoulder laid him out on the ground with the precision of a prize-fighter.

“I felt, my dear,” as Fanny Fitz remarked in a letter to a friend, “as if I were in something between an earthquake and a bad dream and a churn.  I just clamped my legs round the crutches, and she whirled the rest of me round her like the lash of a whip.  In one of her flights she nearly went in at the hall door, and I was aware of William O’Loughlin’s snow-white face somewhere behind the geraniums in the porch.  I think I was clean out of the saddle then.  I remember looking up at my knees, and my left foot was nearly on the ground.  Then she gave another flourish, and swung me up on top again.  I was hanging on to the reins hard; in fact, I think they must have pulled me back on to the saddle, as I know at one time I was sitting in a bunch on the stirrup!  Then I heard most heart-rending yells from the poor old Aunts:  ’Oh, the begonias!  O Fanny, get off the grass!’ and then, suddenly, the filly and I were perfectly still, and the house and the trees were spinning round me, black, edged with green and yellow dazzles.  Then I discovered that some one had got hold of the cavesson rope and had hauled us in, as if we were salmon; Johnny had grabbed me by the left leg, and was trying to drag me off the filly’s back; William O’Loughlin had broken two pots of geraniums, and was praying loudly among the fragments; and Aunt Harriet and Aunt Rachel, who don’t to this hour realise that anything unusual had happened, were reproachfully collecting the trampled remnants of the begonias.”

It was, perhaps unworthy on Fanny Fitz’s part to conceal the painful fact that it was that distinguished fisherman, Mr. Rupert Gunning, who had landed her and the Connemara filly.  Freddy Alexander, however, heard the story in its integrity, and commented on it with his usual candour.  “I don’t know which was the bigger fool, you or Johnny,” he said; “I think you ought to be jolly grateful to old Rupert!”