"Then I'll go under Min Toplady's protection," she said. "I can make her do anything I like—and she shall take me—and jolly good times we shall have, too!"
"Good God!" cried the Professor, "my sister—my sister going to Meetings with public-house ladies in public-house traps"—he forgot that he had once censured Lossie for thus speaking of Gay's old nurse.
Gay nodded emphatically.
"I shall stay at the 'Trotting Nag' altogether, if you're going on as you are now," she said. "Lossie can come and keep house for you—no one could say anything on the score of propriety, you know," she added, with as much malice as her sweet temper permitted, "for she is a relation!"
The Professor shuddered. He had not yet got over the shock Min Toplady's remarks about Lossie had given him overnight. What would become of his specimens, his microscopic work, of him, if pitchforked into matrimony?
Lossie was a deuced pretty woman, of course, but she had a horrid temper, and original as Gay was, his natural selfishness, and sure male instinct, told him he was safer with the latter than the former.
"Well, well," he said, and sat down dejectedly. "A wilful man will have his way, they say, and now that my feminine little sister has taken up with a man's life and sports, I suppose she'll, like him, have her way, no matter who pays."
"Heron!" exclaimed Gay, suddenly contrite, and got up, and went round to him. For a moment she did not speak, and it struck her that she had shed more tears, felt more "sloppy," since she started Trotting, than in all the years of her life before—yes, and apparently done more mischief to others.
"Don't you see, Frank, that if I don't face the music, if I seem ashamed of all this hateful publicity—for it is hateful—I shall only be a coward, and make things worse? I don't promise that I'll give up Trotting, but probably I may—with poor Carlton warned off, I don't expect to take much pleasure in it again. And now, Frank"—she kissed him, and smoothed his hair—"you've got to eat your breakfast, and forget about all this for the present."
She helped him to kidneys, and rang, for fresh coffee. Presently, comforted against his will, Frank stole a glance at Gay, who seemed deep in thought, and indeed with one lover outlawed from his favourite sport, and the other absent, prevented for the time being, from following a dangerous profession that Gay hated, she felt at that moment very friendless indeed.