Flurry did not answer me. His face was as black as thunder. He turned his horse round, cursing two country boys who got in his way, with low and concentrated venom, and began to move forward, followed by the hounds. If his wish was to avoid speaking to Miss Sally it was not to be gratified.
"Good-morning, Flurry," she began, sitting close down to Moonlighter's ramping jog as she rode up beside her cousin. "What a hurry you're in! We passed no end of people on the road who won't be here for another ten minutes."
"No more will I," was Mr. Knox's cryptic reply, as he spurred the brown mare into a trot.
Moonlighter made a vigorous but frustrated effort to buck, and indemnified himself by a successful kick at a hound.
"Bother you, Flurry! Can't you walk for a minute?" exclaimed Miss Sally, who looked about as large, in relation to her horse, as the conventional tomtit on a round of beef. "You might have more sense than to crack your whip under this horse's nose! I don't believe you know what horse it is even!"
I was not near enough to catch Flurry's reply.
"Well, if you didn't want him to be lent to me you shouldn't have sold him to Mr. Shute!" retorted Miss Knox, in her clear, provoking little voice.
"I suppose he's afraid to ride him himself," said Flurry, turning his horse in at a gate. "Get ahead there, Jerome, can't you? It's better to put them in at this end than to have every one riding on top of them!"
Miss Sally's cheeks were still very pink when I came up and began to talk to her, and her grey-green eyes had a look in them like those of an angry kitten.
The riders moved slowly down a rough pasture-field, and took up their position along the brow of Ardmeen covert, into which the hounds had already hurled themselves with their customary contempt for the convenances. Flurry's hounds, true to their nationality, were in the habit of doing the right thing in the wrong way.