“The only people one ever sees there are the people one doesn’t want to see,” said Fanny, “I could meet no one except the auctioneer from Craffroe, and he always said the same thing. ‘Fearful sultry, Miss Fitzroy! Have ye a purchaser yet for your animal, Miss Fitzroy? Ye have not! Oh, fie, fie!’ It was rather funny at first, but it palled.”
“I was only there one day,” said Captain Carteret; “I wish I’d known you had a horse up, I might have helped you to sell.”
“Thanks! I sold all right,” said Fanny Fitz magnificently. “Did rather well too!”
“Capital!” said Captain Carteret vaguely. His acquaintance with Fanny extended over a three-day shooting party in Kildare, and a dance given by the detachment of his regiment at Enniscar, for which he had come down from the depôt. It was not sufficient to enlighten him as to what it meant to her to own and sell a horse for the first time in her life.
“By-the-bye, Gunning,” he went on, “you seemed to be having a lively time in Nassau Street yesterday! My wife and I were driving in from the polo, and we saw you in the thick of what looked like a street row. Some one in the club afterwards told me it was a horse you had only just bought at the Show that had come to grief. I hope it wasn’t much hurt?”
There was a moment of silence—astonished, inquisitive silence on the part of Miss Fitzroy temporary cessation of the faculty of speech on that of Mr. Gunning. It was the moment, as he reflected afterwards, for a clean, decisive lie, a denial of all ownership; either that, or the instant flinging of Captain Carteret overboard.
Unfortunately for him, he did neither; he lied partially, timorously, and with that clinging to the skirts of the truth that marks the novice.
“Oh, she was all right,” he said, his face purpling heavily in the kindly darkness. “What was the polo like, Carteret?”
“But I had no idea that you had bought a horse!” broke in Fanny Fitz, in high excitement. “Why didn’t you tell Maudie and me? What is it like?”
“Oh, it’s—she’s just a cob—a grey cob—I just picked her up at the end of the show.”