“So would anybody’s, my dear.”

“This car,” Val said suddenly, “wants rousing; she doesn’t get her hind legs under her uphill.  I shall have to give her her head on the slope if I’m to catch that train.”

There was that about horses which had prevented him from ever really sympathising with a car, and the running of the Ford under his guidance compared with its running under that of Holly was always noticeable.  He caught the train.

“Take care going home; she’ll throw you down if she can.  Good-bye, darling.”

“Good-bye,” called Holly, and kissed her hand.

In the train, after quarter of an hour’s indecision between thoughts of Holly, his morning paper, the look of the bright day, and his dim memory of Newmarket, Val plunged into the recesses of a small square book, all names, pedigrees, tap-roots, and notes about the make and shape of horses.  The Forsyte in him was bent on the acquisition of a certain strain of blood, and he was subduing resolutely as yet the Dartie hankering for a Nutter.  On getting back to England, after the profitable sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun seldom shone, Val had said to himself:  “I’ve absolutely got to have an interest in life, or this country will give me the blues.  Hunting’s not enough, I’ll breed and I’ll train.”  With just that extra pinch of shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val had seen the weak point of modern breeding.  They were all hypnotised by fashion and high price.  He should buy for looks, and let names go hang!  And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain of blood!  Half-consciously, he thought:  ’There’s something in this damned climate which makes one go round in a ring.  All the same, I must have a strain of Mayfly blood.’

In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes.  It was one of those quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock.  His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called “the silly haw-haw” of some Englishmen, the “flapping cockatoory” of some English-women—­Holly had none of that and Holly was his model.  Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow: 

“Mr. Val Dartie?  How’s Mrs. Val Dartie?  She’s well, I hope.”  And he saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen’s.

“Prosper Profond—­I met you at lunch,” said the voice.

“How are you?” murmured Val.

“I’m very well,” replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain inimitable slowness.  “A good devil,” Holly had called him.  Well!  He looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard; a sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly intelligent.