“Oh, she was all right,” he said, his face purpling heavily in the kindly darkness.  “What was the polo like, Carteret?”

“But I had no idea that you had bought a horse!” broke in Fanny Fitz, in high excitement.  “Why didn’t you tell Maudie and me?  What is it like?”

“Oh, it’s—­she’s just a cob—­a grey cob—­I just picked her up at the end of the show.”

“What sort of a cob?  Can she jump?  Are you going to ride her with Freddy’s hounds?” continued the implacably interested Fanny.

“I bought her as—­as a trapper, and to do a bit of carting,” replied Rupert, beginning suddenly to feel his powers of invention awakening; “she’s quite a common brute.  She doesn’t jump.”

“She seems to have jumped pretty well in Nassau Street,” remarked Captain Carteret; “as well as I could see in the crowd, she didn’t strike me as if she’d take kindly to carting.”

“Well, I do think you might have told us about it!” reiterated Fanny Fitz.  “Men are so ridiculously mysterious about buying or selling horses.  I simply named my price and got it. I see nothing to make a mystery about in a deal; do you, Captain Carteret?”

“Well, that depends on whether you are buying or selling,” replied Captain Carteret.

But Fate, in the shape of a turning tide and a consequent roll, played for once into the hands of Rupert Gunning.  The boat swayed slowly, but deeply, and a waft of steam blew across Miss Fitzroy’s face.  It was not mere steam; it had been among hot oily things, stealing and giving odour.  Fanny Fitz was not ill, but she knew that she had her limits, and that conversation, save of the usual rudimentary kind with the stewardess, were best abandoned.

Miss Fitzroy’s movements during the next two and a half months need not be particularly recorded.  They included—­

1.  A week in London, during which the sixty pounds, or a great part of it, acquired by the sale of the Connemara mare, passed imperceptibly into items, none of which, on a strict survey of expenditure, appeared to exceed three shillings and nine pence.

2.  A month at Southsea, with Rupert Gunning’s sister, Maudie Spicer, where she again encountered Captain Carteret, and entered aimlessly upon a semi-platonic and wholly unprofitable flirtation with him.  During this epoch she wore out the remnant of her summer clothes and laid in substitutes; rather encouraged than otherwise by the fact that she had long since lost touch with the amount of her balance at the bank.

3.  An expiatory and age-long sojourn of three weeks with relatives at an Essex vicarage, mitigated only by persistent bicycling with her uncle’s curate.  The result, as might have been predicted by any one acquainted with Miss Fitzroy, was that the curate’s affections were diverted from the bourne long appointed for them, namely, the eldest daughter of the house, and that Fanny departed in blackest disgrace, with the single consolation of knowing that she would never be asked to the vicarage again.