‘We’ll manage with a snaffle,’ she answered, with, I thought, another sly glance at me, out of eyes sparkling with suppressed merriment and expectation! Her father had gone to find the gardener, and as we stood waiting for him she still stroked the mare’s neck.
‘Are you not afraid of taking cold,’ I said, ‘without your bonnet?’
‘I never had a cold in my life,’ she returned.
‘That is saying much. You would have me believe you are not made of the same clay as other people.’
‘Believe anything you like,’ she answered carelessly.
‘Then I do believe it,’ I rejoined.
She looked me in the face, took her hand from the mare’s neck, stepped back half-a-foot and looked round, saying—
‘I wonder where that man can have got to. Oh, here he comes, and papa with him!’
We went across the trim little lawn, which lay waiting for the warmer weather to burst into a profusion of roses, and through a trellised porch entered a shadowy little hall, with heads of stags and foxes, an old-fashioned glass-doored bookcase, and hunting and riding whips, whence we passed into a low-pitched drawing-room, redolent of dried rose-leaves and fresh hyacinths. A little pug-dog, which seemed to have failed in swallowing some big dog’s tongue, jumped up barking from the sheep-skin mat, where he lay before the fire.
‘Stupid pug!’ said Clara. ‘You never know friends from foes! I wonder where my aunt is.’