Rupert Gunning was also, but with excessive reluctance, discussing the Horse Show.  As he had given himself a good deal of trouble in order to cross on this particular evening, and as any one who was even slightly acquainted with Miss Fitzroy must have been aware that she would decline to talk of anything else, sympathy for him is not altogether deserved.  The boat swung softly in a trance of speed, and Miss Fitzroy, better known to a large circle of intimates as Fanny Fitz, tried to think the motion was pleasant.  She had made a good many migrations to England, by various routes and classes.  There had indeed been times of stress when she had crossed unostentatiously, third class, trusting that luck and a thick veil might save her from her friends, but the day after she had sold a horse for sixty pounds was not the day for a daughter of Ireland to study economics.  The breeze brought warm and subtle wafts from the machinery; it also blew wisps of hair into Fanny Fitz’s eyes and over her nose, in a manner much revered in fiction, but in real life usually unbecoming and always exasperating.  She leaned back on the bench and wondered whether the satisfaction of crowing over Mr. Gunning compensated her for abandoning the tranquil security of the ladies’ cabin.

Mr. Gunning, though less contradictious than his wont, was certainly one of the most deliberately unsympathetic men she knew.  None the less he was a man, and some one to talk to, both points in his favour, and she stayed on.

“I just missed meeting the man who bought my mare,” she said, recurring to the subject for the fourth time; “apparently he didn’t think her ’a leggy, long-backed brute,’ as other people did, or said they did!”

“Did many people say it?” asked Mr. Gunning, beginning to make a cigarette.

“Oh, no one whose opinion signified!” retorted Fanny Fitz, with a glance from her charming, changeful eyes that suggested that she did not always mean quite what she said.  “I believe the dealer bought her for a Leicestershire man.  What she really wants is a big country where she can extend herself.”

Mr. Gunning reflected that by this time the grey mare had extended herself once for all in Brennan’s back-yard:  he had done nothing to be ashamed of, but he felt abjectly guilty.

“If I go with Maudie to Connemara again next year,” continued Fanny, “I must look out for another.  You’ll come too, I hope?  A little opposition is such a help in making up one’s mind!  I don’t know what I should have done without you at Leenane last June!”

Perhaps it was the vision of early summer that the words called up; perhaps it was the smile, half-seen in the semi-dark, that curved her provoking lips; perhaps it was compunction for his share in the tragedy of the Connemara mare; but possibly without any of these explanations Rupert would have done as he did, which was to place his hand on Fanny Fitz’s as it lay on the bench beside him.