But Margot, appealed to by this very headstrong daughter, looked thoughtful. “They can be fierce, even. Horses! why, of course. I don’t know about these, but we once had a stampede. Mother and I didn’t see anything of it, but dad told us that if it hadn’t been for Long Jake....”
Even Stella appeared to knuckle under to the general opinion, since Long Jake, the dormitory hero, evidently shared it. “Still these horses wouldn’t be,” she added. “They’re mostly old and half worn out. The gipsies buy them at fairs and sell them again. Well, I don’t know what we can do at all, then.”
Margot, however, had a suggestion to make.
“Look here. The horses would have been frightfully jolly, but there’s another thing. I thought of it as we were driving here. Aren’t you somewhere near the ‘Little House,’ where the old man lives? Couldn’t we—go and just look at it. We saw it from the train coming down, but I’d love to tell Gretta more about it to-night in the dorm.”
“Oh, if you like,” returned her hostess, in rather a bored tone of voice. “It’s only about a half-mile away.”
But if an excursion to the outside of the “Little House” was a very everyday affair to Stella, to Margot, who had been shut up for weeks within school bounds, the mere fact of being outside walls and gates, and walking in the wide, open spaces of the moor, with the huge expanse of the blue sea ahead, and all the winds of Heaven let loose around her—to Margot this was a thrilling joy in itself.
“Oh, I say, this is jolly,” said she. “I wish Gretta were here.”
But Stella was still deep in disappointment that the thrill of the afternoon was missing. “If only you had been here last week, dad would have taken us. Then you could have tried that ‘whispering’ on some of the horses. The gipsies would have let you. Dad knows some of them, and he says they’re quite decent sorts, though all gipsies aren’t. They camp here, you know. See!”
She pointed across an expanse of moor.
“If we cut over this ridge and then down by the next, we’ll be able to see the ‘Little House,’” said Stella.