Obedient to her will, he kept several lengths behind her.  When she found he did not draw up alongside, she slackened her pace.  He felt her resistance was dying down in answer to his non-resistance.  She was shoving against emptiness, and getting no good from it.

As they came to the crest of the Downs and began the descent of the hill, Boy dropped into a walk.

Below them the long roofs of Putnam’s showed, weathered among the sycamores.

As the girl passed into the Paddock Close he was riding at her side again.

The Paddock Close was a vast enclosure, fenced off from the Downs, an ideal nursery and galloping ground for young stock.

There was hill and valley; here and there a group of trees for shade in the dog-days; a great sheltered bottom fringed by a wood that ran out into the Close like a peninsula; and the wall of the Downs to give protection from the east.

As they walked together down the hill, Boy was looking about her.

“Where’s the mare?” she asked.

They were the first words she had spoken.

“Which mare?” asked Silver

“Four Pound.”

He glanced round.  The young stock were standing lazily under the trees, swishing their tails, and stamping off the flies.  But the old mare had forsaken her usual haunt.

Then far away on the edge of a bed of bracken in the bottom, something like a piece of brown paper caught his eye.  It rose and fell and flapped in the wind.

Boy saw it, too, and darted off.

“Call Billy Bluff!” she cried over her shoulder; but Billy had already trotted off to the yard to renew the pleasant task of tormenting Maudie and the fan-tails.

The girl made at a canter for the brown paper struggling on the edge of the bracken.

As she came closer she raised a swift hand to steady the man pounding behind her.

The brown paper was a new-born foal, woolly, dun of hue, swaying on uncertain legs.  The little creature, with the mane and tail of a toy horse, looking supremely pathetic in its helplessness, wavered ridiculously in the wind.  It was all knees and hocks, and fluffy tail that wriggled, and jelly-like eyes.  Its tall, thin legs were stuck out before and behind like those of a wooden horse.  It stood like one dazed, staring blankly before it, absorbed in the new and surprising action of drawing breath through widespread nostrils; quavered and then collapsed, only to attempt to climb to its feet again.

Close beside her child lay the mother, her neck extended along the green, her eyes blood-shot.

As the girl rode up, the old mare raised her gaunt, well-bred head and snorted, but made no effort to rise.

Boy dismounted.

“Hold Ragamuffin, will you?” she said.

Silver, himself dismounted now, obeyed.

Boy knelt in the bracken and felt the mare’s heart.

The young man stood some distance off and watched her.