“The beauties!  Give them to me, Bertie.  Dangerous?  How absurd you are; as if I could not drive anything?  Do you remember my four roans at Longchamps?”

She could, indeed, with justice, pique herself on her skill; she drove matchlessly, but as he resigned them to her, Maraschino and his companion quickened their trot, and tossed their pretty thoroughbred heads, conscious of a less powerful hand on the reins.

“I shall let their pace out; there is nobody to run over here,” said her ladyship.

Maraschino, as though hearing the flattering conjuration swung off into a light, quick canter, and tossed his head again; he knew that, good whip though she was, he could jerk his mouth free in a second, if he wanted.  Cecil laughed—­prudence was at no time his virtue—­and leaned back contentedly, to be driven at a slashing pace through the balmy summer’s night, while the ring of the hoofs rang merrily on the turf, and the boughs were tossed aside with a dewy fragrance.  As they went, the moonlight was shed about their path in the full of the young night, and at the end of a vista of boughs, on a grassy knoll were some phantom forms—­the same graceful shapes that stand out against the purple heather and the tawny gorse of Scottish moorlands, while the lean rifle-tube creeps up by stealth.  In the clear starlight there stood the deer—­a dozen of them, a clan of stags alone—­with their antlers clashing like a clash of swords, and waving like swaying banners as they tossed their heads and listened.[*]

[*] Let me here take leave to beg pardon of the gallant Highland stags for comparing them one instant with the shabby, miserable-looking wretches that travesty them in Richmond Park.  After seeing these latter scrubby, meager apologies for deer, one wonders why something better cannot be turned loose there.  A hunting-mare I know well nevertheless flattered them thus by racing them through the park:  when in harness herself, to her own great disgust.

In an instant the hunter pricked his ears, snuffed the air, and twitched with passionate impatience at his bit; another instant and he had got his head, and, launching into a sweeping gallop, rushed down the glade.

Cecil sprang forward from his lazy rest, and seized the ribbons that in one instant had cut his companion’s gloves to stripes.

“Sit still,” he said calmly, but under his breath.  “He had been always ridden with the Buckhounds; he will race the deer as sure as we live!”

Race the deer he did.

Startled, and fresh for their favorite nightly wandering, the stags were off like the wind at the noise of alarm, and the horses tore after them; no skill, no strength, no science could avail to pull them in; they had taken their bits between their teeth, and the devil that was in Maraschino lent the contagion of sympathy to the young carriage mare, who had never gone at such a pace since she had been first put in her break.