“You may suggest what you please, sir. I am driving a perch-phaeton.”
“I am not so sure,” he said. “You have not yet convinced me that you are able to drive it.”
She glanced out of the window at his tiger, standing to the heads of the restless wheelers harnessed to the, curricle. The Earl was not driving his chestnuts to-day, but a team of greys. “Let me assure you, sir, that I am not only capable of handling a pair, but I could drive your team just as easily!” she declared.
“Very well,” said the Earl unexpectedly. “Drive it!”
She was quite taken aback. “Do you mean—now?”
“Why not? Are you afraid?”
“Afraid! I should like nothing better, but I am not dressed for driving.”
“You may have twenty minutes,” said the Earl, moving over to a chair by the table.
Miss Taverner was by no means pleased at this cool way of dismissing her, but she was too anxious to prove her driving skill to stay to argue the point. She whisked herself out of the room and up the stairs, set a bell pealing for her maid, and informed her astonished chaperone that there would be no walk in the Park. She was going driving with my Lord Worth.
She joined his lordship again in just a quarter of an hour, having changed her floating muslins for a severely cut habit made of some dark cloth, and a small velvet hat turned up on one side from her clustering gold ringlets, and with a curled feather hanging down on the other. “I am ready, my lord,” she said, drawing on a pair of serviceable York tan gloves.