Morsfield declared himself incapable of turning and meeting that chariot.  He sighed heavily.  Cumnock offered to cheer him with a song of Captain Chanter’s famous collection, if he liked; but Morsfield gesticulated abhorrence, and set out at a trot.  Song in defeat was a hiss of derision to him.

He had failed.  Having failed, he for the first time perceived the wildness of a plot that had previously appeared to him as one of the Yorkshire Morsfields’ moves to win an object.  Traditionally they stopped at nothing.  There would have been a sunburst of notoriety in the capture and carrying off of the beautiful Countess of Ormont.

She had eluded him during the downward journey to Steignton.  He came on her track at the village at the junction of the roads above Ashead, and thence, confiding in the half-connivance or utter stupidity of the fair one’s duenna, despatched a mounted man-servant to his coachman and footmen, stationed ten miles behind, with orders that they should drive forthwith to the great plain, and be ready at a point there for two succeeding days.  That was the plot, promptly devised upon receipt of Mrs. Pagnell’s communication; for the wealthy man of pleasure was a strategist fit to be a soldier, in dexterity not far from rivalling the man by whom he had been outdone.

An ascetic on the road to success, he dedicated himself to a term of hard drinking under a reverse; and the question addressed to the chief towns in the sketch counties his head contained was, which one near would be likely to supply the port wine for floating him through garlanding dreams of possession most tastily to blest oblivion.

He was a lover, nevertheless, honest in his fashion, and meant not worse than to pull his lady through a mire, and wash her with Morsfield soap, and crown her, and worship.  She was in his blood, about him, above him; he had plunged into her image, as into deeps that broke away in phosphorescent waves on all sides, reflecting every remembered, every imagined, aspect of the adored beautiful woman piercing him to extinction with that last look of her at the moment of flight.

Had he been just a trifle more sincere in the respect he professed for his lady’s duenna, he would have turned on the road to Dornton and a better fortune.  Mrs. Pagnell had now become the ridiculous Paggy of Mrs. Lawrence Finchley and her circle for the hypocritical gentleman; and he remarked to Captain Cumnock, when their mutual trot was established:  ’Paggy enough for me for a month—­good Lord!  I can’t stand another dose of her by herself.’

‘It’s a bird that won’t roast or boil or stew,’ said the captain.

They were observed trotting along below by Lord Ormont’s groom of the stables on promotion, as he surveyed the country from the chalk-hill rise and brought the phaeton to a stand, Jonathan Boon, a sharp lad, whose comprehension was a little muddled by ‘the rights of it’ in this adventure.  He knew, however, that he did well to follow the directions of one who was in his lordship’s pay, and stretched out the fee with the air of a shake of the hand, and had a look of the winning side, moreover.  A born countryman could see that.