“D’you remember, we both vowed we’d marry widows rather than a raw girl?” said Ally in reminiscence. “By Jove! How I wished I had.”
“It’s cornery at first. My wife told me what struck her most was that I came in to speak to her in my shirt-sleeves, and without thinking took up one of her brushes and brushed my hair. She thought, ‘What cheek!’”
“Well, there’s one thing that stumps me now,” said Ally.
“I know what you’re going to say—she buttons her gowns from right to left.”
“You’ve seen it too? Why the devil do they? All our clothes go from left to right. I believe it’s that that makes women always look at a thing hind-side before—their very point of view grows topsy-turvy.”
“Ally!” came Mrs. Lewin’s voice from the doorway. “Come and change your coat—you can’t dance in a jacket. Captain Nugent, how are we to get there?”
Both men rose rather guiltily. “I am afraid you’ll have to ride, Mrs. Lewin,” Nugent said. “Ponies, y’know. Every one does here. Can you turn up your skirt? I’d get you a buggy, but there are only three in Port Victoria, and they are all hired for to-night.”
“Elementary, but exciting,” said Chum calmly. “Go and get me a pony, that’s all, and I’ll show you.”
She was as good as her word when the ponies came round; they were rats of things, and the new lady’s saddle which Mrs. Lewin had brought out looked astonishingly big on the animal assigned her. But she tucked up her silk skirts as if to the manner born, and the procession clattered off from the front of the hotel, audienced by half-a-dozen Chinese, loafers of three dusky races—for Key Island has a mixed population—and some lean hens. The darkness had come at last, but out of the irregular wooden houses shone the electric light with the bizarre effect it always produces in such elementary places. The ponies shambled along at a miniature canter, and Leoline gripped the pommel by habit with a dreamy remembrance that some time since she had set a thoroughbred across the finest hunting country in England. Such things seemed to belong to another life, with the smell of eucalyptus and moonflowers coming into her nostrils on a warm, wet breeze, and the glimpses of Port Victoria by electric flashes. They rocked down the main street, and for an instant the quay was on their left before they turned up-hill to their destination; again she saw the grouped ravenala palms, the huge wharves, the bay, and the grim Gates at the harbour mouth, black sentinels against the darkening sky. Then Captain Nugent steered to the left, along a bad road where anything but a Key’land pony would have stumbled, and suddenly they emerged into the most wonderful avenue of cocoanut palms, with soft sand underfoot, and as if by common consent the up-hill canter changed to a hard gallop.
“Look out!” Nugent called, pulling in beside Mrs. Lewin. “This is Mitsinjovy Straight, the only bit of flat land round about. They always gallop here; mind!”