Silence again reigned. One or two further attempts at conversation met with equal discouragement. The miles passed by. At length, as the mare slackened to walk up a long hill, Rupert said with a voice that had the shake of pent-up injury:—
“I’ve been wondering what I’ve done to be put into Coventry like this!”
“I thought you probably wouldn’t care to speak to me!” was Fanny’s astonishing reply, delivered in tones of ice.
“I!” he stammered, “not care to speak to you! You ought to know—”
“Yes, indeed, I do know!” broke in Fanny, passing from the frigid to the torrid zone with characteristic speed, “I know what a failure your horse-dealing at the Dublin Show was! I’ve heard how you bought my mare, and had her shot the same night, because you wouldn’t take the trouble even to go and look at her after the poor little thing was hurt! Oh! I can’t bear even to think of it!”
Rupert Gunning remained abjectly and dumfoundedly silent.
“And then,” continued Fanny, whirling on to the final point of her indictment, “you pretended to Captain Carteret and me that the horse you had bought was ‘a common brute,’ a cob for carting, and you said the other night that you had made a fool of yourself over it! I didn’t know then all about it, but I do now. Captain Carteret heard about it from the dealer in Dublin. Even the dealer said it was a pity you hadn’t given the mare a chance!”
“It’s all perfectly true,” said Rupert, in a low voice.
A soft answer, so far from turning away wrath, frequently inflames it.
“Then I think there’s no more to be said!” said Fanny hotly.