Next day, as they were making their Sunday round of the horses together, Silver stopped at Heart of Oak’s box.

“I don’t quite know what to be at with this poor old cormorant,” he said, slow and cogitating.  “I’m looking for a home for him.  But there are no bidders.  A bit too good a doer, I guess.  Eat ’em out of hearth and home.”

The girl’s eyes flashed on his face and away again.

“He’s not old,” she said, as her hand stroked the pony’s neck.

“Well, he’s like me,” the young man replied.  “He’s older than he was.”

Boy made a cursory inspection of the pony’s mouth.

“Eleven off,” she said.

“That’s too old to play polo.”

She believed it to be a lie, but she did not think she was sufficient an authority on the game to justify her in saying so.

“Anyway, I’m getting too heavy for him,” Silver went on.  “Joint too big for the dish, as they say.  That fellow’s more my sort, ain’t you, old lad?” He nodded to the next loose-box, where his seventeen-hand hunter, Banjo, stood, blowing at them through the bars.  “What Heart of Oak wants is a nice light weight just to hack him about the Downs and ease him down into the grave.”

That evening after supper Jim Silver sang.

Apart from the members of the Eton Mission Clubs there were perhaps a dozen men in the world—­Eton men all, boating men most—­who knew that he did “perform,” to use their expression; and just two women—­Boy Woodburn and her mother.  Old Mat, to be sure, did not count, for he always slept through the “performance.”

The young man’s repertoire consisted of two songs—­The Place Where the
Old Horse Died and My Old Dutch.

With a good natural voice, entirely untrained, he sang with a deep and quiet feeling that made his friends affirm that once you had heard Silver Mug’s—­

We’ve been together now for forty years, And it don’t seem a day too much, There ain’t a lady livin’ in the land As I’d swop for my dear old Dutch.

you would never listen to Albert Chevalier again.

That, of course, was the just and admirable exaggeration of youth and friendship.

But it was the fact that always after the young man had sung there was an unusually prolonged silence, and, as Amersham once said, you felt as if you were in church.

This evening, after he had finished, and Mrs. Woodburn had broken the silence with her quiet “Thank you,” the young man returned to the subject he had broached in the stable.

Silver indeed was nothing if not dogged, as the girl was beginning to find out.

“I say, Miss Woodburn,” he began in that casual way of his, “I wish you’d take charge of that old yellow moke o’ mine.”

Boy shook her head.

He laughed and drew his chair beside her as she worked.  Not seldom now he doffed the Puritan with her, and became easy, chaffing, almost gallant.  Amersham and his friends would have been amazed had they seen their sober Jim Silver so much at home with a lady.