’Seven, Miss, was when you began to ‘unt,’ said Rhoda, setting down more buttered toast.

‘And so,’ the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, ’when he got to your brute Sidney’s land, we had to whip ’em off.  It’s a regular Alsatia for ’em.  They know it.  Why’—­he dropped his voice—­’I don’t want to say anything against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do believe the old scoundrel’s perfectly capable of putting down poison.’

‘Sidney’s capable of anything,’ said Midmore with immense feeling; but once again he held his tongue.  They were a queer community; yet when they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt hugely big and disconcerting.

This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life.  It ran in odd channels that summer—­a riding school, for instance, near Hayes Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs.  A man who has been saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he curtails his expenses in other directions.  So a cloud settled on Midmore’s name.  His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause.  One man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously and demanded account of his soul’s progress.  It was not furnished, for Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors’ horses into them.  The man went away, and served up what he had heard of the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to annoy.  Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman’s, and since most of his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend.  She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised heart—­she knew all about it—­had found so-lace, with a long O, in another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be betrayed to other loyal friends.  As his hints pointed directly towards facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work.  Later, when his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of ‘secret gardens’ and those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding.  So true it is, as he read in one of the late Colonel Werf’s books, that ’the young man of the present day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against his knowledge of horse-flesh.’