He went up to Swells.  On his lips were the words:  “What made you give the show away like that?” He did not speak them, for in his soul he felt it would not become him to ask his jockey why he had not dissembled and won by a length.  But the little jockey understood at once.

“Mr. Blacksmith’s been at me, sir.  You take my tip:  he’s a queer one, that ’orse.  I thought it best to let him run his own race.  Mark my words, he knows what’s what.  When they’re like that, they’re best let alone.”

A voice behind him said: 

“Well, George, congratulate you!  Not the way I should have ridden the race myself.  He should have lain off to the distance.  Remarkable turn of speed that horse.  There’s no riding nowadays!”

The Squire and General Pendyce were standing there.  Erect and slim, unlike and yet so very much alike, the eyes of both of them seemed saying: 

’I shall differ from you; there are no two opinions about it.  I shall differ from you!’

Behind them stood Mrs. Bellew.  Her eyes could not keep still under their lashes, and their light and colour changed continually.  George walked on slowly at her side.  There was a look of triumph and softness about her; the colour kept deepening in her cheeks, her figure swayed.  They did not look at each other.

Against the Paddock railings stood a man in riding-clothes, of spare figure, with a horseman’s square, high shoulders, and thin long legs a trifle bowed.  His narrow, thin-lipped, freckled face, with close-cropped sandy hair and clipped red moustache, was of a strange dead pallor.  He followed the figures of George and his companion with little fiery dark-brown eyes, in which devils seemed to dance.  Someone tapped him on the arm.

“Hallo, Bellew! had a good race?”

“Devil take you, no!  Come and have a drink?”

Still without looking at each other, George and Mrs. Bellew walked towards the gate.

“I don’t want to see any more,” she said.  “I should like to get away at once.”

“We’ll go after this race,” said George.  “There’s nothing running in the last.”

At the back of the Grand Stand, in the midst of all the hurrying crowd, he stopped.

“Helen?” he said.

Mrs. Bellew raised her eyes and looked full into his.

Long and cross-country is the drive from Royston Railway Station to Worsted Skeynes.  To George Pendyce, driving the dog cart, with Helen Bellew beside him, it seemed but a minute—­that strange minute when the heaven is opened and a vision shows between.  To some men that vision comes but once, to some men many times.  It comes after long winter, when the blossom hangs; it comes after parched summer, when the leaves are going gold; and of what hues it is painted—­of frost-white and fire, of wine and purple, of mountain flowers, or the shadowy green of still deep pools—­the seer alone can tell.  But this is certain—­the vision steals from him who looks on it all images of other things, all sense of law, of order, of the living past, and the living present.  It is the future, fair-scented, singing, jewelled, as when suddenly between high banks a bough of apple-blossom hangs quivering in the wind loud with the song of bees.