For the moment her passions were like clouds in thunder
weather, mounting against the wind; and in the small
tumult of them she let jealousy dart its last lightning
tongue.
“I am not learned in these matters, my lord.
But I have heard that man must make a deity of something.
The worse sort of unbeliever, they say, lives in
the present and burns incense to himself. The
better sort, having no future to believe in, idolises
his past.”
“Margaret is dead,” he repeated.
“I am no sentimentalist.”
She bent her head. To herself she whispered.
“He may not idolise his past, yet he cannot
escape from it.” . . . And her thoughts
might have travelled farther, but she had put the
mare to a walk again and just then her ears caught
an unaccustomed sound, or confusion of sounds.
At the end of the alley she reined up, wide-eyed.
A narrow gateway here gave access to what had yesterday
been a sloping paddock where Miss Quiney grazed a
couple of cows. To-day the cows had vanished
and given way to a small army of labourers. Broad
strips of turf had vanished also and the brown loam
was moving downhill in scores of wheel-barrows, to
build up the slope to a level.
Sir Oliver marked her amazement and answered it with
an easy laugh.
“The time is short, you see, and already we
have wasted half an hour of it unprofitably. . . .
These fellows appear to be working well.”
She gazed at the moving gangs as one who, having come
by surprise upon a hive of bees, stands still and
cons the small creatures at work.
“But what is the meaning of it?”
“The meaning? Why, that for this week
I am your riding-master, and that by to-morrow you
will have a passable riding-school.”
THE PROSPECT.
This happened on a Thursday. On the following
Wednesday, a while before day-break, he met her on
horseback by the gate of Sabines, and they rode forth
side by side, ahead of the coach wherein Miss Quiney
sat piled about with baggage, clutching in one hand
a copy of Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting
Rest and with the other the ring of a canary-cage.
(It was Dicky’s canary, and his first love-offering.
Yesterday had been Ruth’s birthday—her
eighteenth—and under conduct of Manasseh
he had visited Sabines to wish her “many happy
returns” and to say good-bye.)
Sir Oliver would escort the travellers for twelve
miles on their way, to a point where the inland road
broke into cart-tracks, and the tracks diverged across
a country newly disafforested and strewn with jagged
stumps among which the heavy vehicle could by no means
be hauled. Here Farmer Cordery was to be in waiting
with his light tilt-covered wagon.
