But Rose persisted, saying, “But, you see, this isn’t my first season. Stick to the old horse for a little while.”
“No,” Christabel said firmly. “If Francis thinks I can ride the mare, I should like to have her.”
Rose laughed, but she felt uneasy, and Francis said, “I told you so. She has any amount of pluck. You come and watch.”
“No, I can’t come to-morrow. I think I’ll see her first in all her glory on the grey mare.”
“All the same,” Christabel added, “if she’s very expensive, I don’t want her. Francis is extravagant over horses, and we have to be careful.”
“We’ll economize somewhere else,” he said. “The mare is yours.”
She suppressed a sigh. Rose was sure of it, and in after days she was to ask herself many times if she had been to blame in not interpreting that sigh to Francis. But she had to give Christabel, and Christabel especially, the loyalty of one woman to another. She would not wrench from her in a few words the pride Francis took in her, to which she sacrificed her fears. Rose had the astuteness of a jealousy she would not own, of a sense of possession she could not discard, and she had known, from the first moment, that Christabel was afraid of horses and dreaded the very name of hunting. And Rose divined, too, that if she herself had not been a horsewoman of some repute, Christabel would have been less ambitious; she would have been contented with the old brown horse; but Christabel, too, had an astuteness. No, she could not have interfered; yet when she first saw Christabel on the mare she was alarmed to the point of saying:
“Are you sure she’s all right? You’d better keep beside her, Francis.”
The mare was fidgety and hot-headed. Christabel’s hands were unsteady, her face was pale, her lips were tight; but she was gay, and Francis was proud to have her and her mount admired.
Rose looked round in despair. Could no one else see what was so plain to her? She was tempted to go home. She felt she could not bear the strain of watching that little figure perched on the grey beast that looked like a wraith, like a warning. But she did not go, and she learnt to be glad to have shared with Francis the horror of the moment when the mare, out of control and mad with excitement, tried a fence topping a bank, failed, and fell with Christabel beneath her.