"Be it all right about the grey horse, Master?"
"What of him?" asked Kate.
"He be gone to Neville Court, Mistress. But I suppose (with a horrid leer) it is all right. Master Neville told me all about it. He said, says he, 'Some do break a kine or the likes on those here joyful occasions; other some do exchange gold rings. Your young Mistress and me, toe exchange nags. She takes my pieball; I take her grey;' says he. 'Saddle him for me, Joe,' says he, 'and wish me joy.' So I clapped Master Neville's saddle on the grey, and a gave me a golden guinea a did, and I was so struck of a heap I let un go without wishing on him joy; but I hollered it arter un, as hard as I could. How you looks! It be all right, baint it?"
Squire Peyton laughed heartily, and said he concluded it was all right: "The piebald," said he, "is rising five, and I've had the grey ten years. We have got the sunny side of that bargain, Joe." He gave Joe a glass of wine and sent him off, inflated with having done a good stroke in horseflesh.
As for Kate she was red as fire, and kept her lips close as wax; not a word could be got out of her. The less she said the more she thought. She was thoroughly vexed, and sore perplexed how to get her grey horse back from such a man as George Neville; and yet she could not help laughing at the trick, and secretly admiring this chevalier, who had kept his mortification to himself, and parried an affront so gallantly.
"The good-humored wretch!" said she to herself. "If Griffith ever goes away again, he will have me, whether I like or no. No lady could resist the monster long, without some other man at hand to help her."
[CHAPTER V]
As, when a camel drops in the desert, vultures, hitherto unseen, come flying from the horizon, so Mr. Charlton had no sooner succumbed, than the air darkened with undertakers flocking to Bolton for a lugubrious job. They rode up on black steeds, they crunched the gravel in grave gigs, and sent in black-edged cards to Griffith, and lowered their voices, and bridled their briskness, and tried hard, poor souls, to be sad: and were horribly complacent beneath that thin japan of venal sympathy.
Griffith selected his Raven, and then sat down to issue numerous invitations.