“Back the Prince’s filly!”
The idea came with such a flash across his brain that he started and looked sharply over his shoulder to see if any one had spoken.
“How curious,” he thought. “It just shows how impressionable the human mind is. If I gave way to it, I should begin calculating odds, and fooling away my pittance in gambling on the turf. I suppose every man has the gaming instinct latent within him, ready to fly into activity directly the right string is pulled. Ah, well, it isn’t so with me.”
He walked on, trying to think of how beautiful the day was, and how lovely the silver-damascened sea, with the blue hills beyond; but away softly, describing arcs of circles with the tips of her masts, lay Glyddyr’s yacht, and there, just before him, was Glyddyr himself going into the little post office, where the one wire from the telegraph pole seemed to descend through the roof.
“Gone to send a message,” thought Chris, with a feeling of anger that he could not for the moment analyse, but whose explanation seemed to come the next moment. To back the Prince’s horse, perhaps make more thousands, and then—“Oh! this is maddening!” he said, half aloud; and he increased his pace till he reached the pretty cottage where he had long been the tenant of a pleasant, elderly, ship-captain’s widow; and after hanging his rod upon the hooks in the little passage, entered his room, threw the creel into the corner, and himself into a chair.
“Cut dead!” he exclaimed bitterly. “After all these years of happy life, to be served like that.”
“Back the Prince’s filly.”
The words seemed to stand out before him, and he gave quite a start as the door opened and the pleasant smiling face of his landlady appeared, the bustling woman bearing in a large clean blue dish.
“How many this time, Mr Lisle?” she said. “Of course you’ll like some for dinner?”
“What? No; none at all, Mrs Sarson,” said Chris hastily.