“Confound you, Beauty; get up!”

“Never swear, Seraph; not ever so mildly,” yawned Cecil, “it’s gone out, you know; only the cads and the clergy can damn one nowadays; it’s such bad style to be so impulsive.  Look!  You have broken the back of my Demirep!”

“You deserve to break the King’s back over the first cropper,” laughed the Seraph.  “Do get up!”

“Bother!” sighed the victim, raising himself with reluctance, while the Seraph disappeared in a cloud of Turkish.

Neither Bertie’s indolence nor his insouciance was assumed; utter carelessness was his nature, utter impassability was his habit, and he was truly for the moment loath to leave his bed, his coffee, and his novel; he must have his leg over the saddle, and feel the strain on his arms of that “pulling” pace with which the King always went when once he settled into his stride, before he would really think about winning.

The hunting breakfasts of our forefathers and of our present squires found no favor with Bertie; a slice of game and a glass of Curacoa were all he kept the drag waiting to swallow; and the four bays going at a pelting pace, he and the rest of the Household who were gathered at Royallieu were by good luck in time for the throw-off of the Quorn, where the hero o’ the Blue Ribbon was dancing impatiently under Willon’s hand, scenting the fresh, keen, sunny air, and knowing as well what all those bits of scarlet straying in through field and lane, gate and gap, meant, as well as though the merry notes of the master’s horn were winding over the gorse.  The meet was brilliant and very large; showing such a gathering as only the Melton country can; and foremost among the crowd of carriages, hacks, and hunters, were the beautiful roan mare Vivandiere of the Lady Guenevere, mounted by that exquisite peeress in her violet habit and her tiny velvet hat; and the pony equipage of the Zu-Zu, all glittering with azure and silver, leopard rugs, and snowy reins:  the breadth of half an acre of grassland was between them, but the groups of men about them were tolerably equal for number and for rank.

“Take Zu-Zu off my hands for this morning, Seraph; there’s a good fellow,” murmured Cecil, as he swung himself into saddle.  The Seraph gave a leonine growl, sighed, and acquiesced.  He detested women in the hunting-field, but that sweetest tempered giant of the Brigades never refused anything to anybody—­much less to “Beauty.”

To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his two claimants—­bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the pony-trap under cover of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and restoring the Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of a little