I seemed to be lapsing rapidly into the terrible third that spoils sport, so I left them; but not all the adjurations of Godfrey Parndon invoking his favorite antagonist to the whist-table could draw Guy from his post again that evening.

I know men who would have given five years of life for the whisper that glided into his ear as he gave Miss Bellasys her candle on retiring, ten for the Parthian glance that shot its arrow home.

CHAPTER IX.

     “I know the purple vestment;
       I know the crest of flame;
     So ever rides Mamilius,
       Prince of the Latian name.”

The next was a perfect hunting morning; a light breeze, steady from the southwest, and not too much sun; the very day when a scent, in and out of cover, would be a certainty, if there were any calculation on this contingency.  Let us do our sisters justice—­there is one thing in nature more uncertain and capricious than the whims of womankind.

The hounds had come up with their usual train of officials, and of those steady-going sportsmen who love the pack better than their own children, and can call each individual in it by his name.  Godfrey Parndon was doing the civil to the “great men in Israel,” his heaviest subscribers; pinks were gleaming in every direction through the clumps and belts of plantation, as the men came up at a hard gallop on their cover-hacks, or opened the pipes of their hunters by a stretch over the turf of the park.

On the hall steps stood Flora Bellasys—­Penthesilea in a wide-awake and plume; a dozen men were round her, striving emulously for a word or a smile, and she held her own gallantly with them all.  She was waiting patiently till Guy had lighted an obstinate cigar, and was ready to mount her.  He understood putting her up better than any one else, she said.  Perhaps he did; but, though he swung her into the saddle with one wave of his mighty arm as lightly as Lochinvar could have done, the arrangement of the skirt and stirrup seemed a problem hardly to be solved.

If there was any truth in the old Courland superstition that the display of a lady’s ankle to the hunters before they started brought them luck, we ought to have had the run of the season that day.

He rode by her side, too, as near as the plunges of the chestnut would allow, till we reached the gorse that we were to draw; once there, the stronger passion prevailed.  Aphrodite hid her face, and the great goddess Artemis claimed her own.  As the first hound whimpered, he drew off toward a corner, where a big fence would give a chance of shaking off the crowd, and I do not think he turned his head till the fox went away.

The last thing I remember there was the anxious look in two beautiful hazel eyes as they gazed after the Axeine, charging his second fence with the rush of an express train.

The fetiche did not fail us; we had a wonderful run, of which only five men saw the end.  I confess, the second brook stopped me and many others.  Forrester got over with a fall; but they were preparing to break up the fox, when he came up first of the second flight.