"Oh!" cried Gay, and caught her breath, then leaning forward, said almost in a whisper: "I'm just dying to do it again. I've been possessed with the idea ever since you told me a lady drove for you in Vienna!"
He laughed.
"Why not?" he said again, in that way of his that no one else had, and which made impossibilities not only possible, but easy. "I'll take you down to Inigo any day you like after to-morrow, and you shall drive one horse, and I drive another—"
Gay sat erect, quivering with eagerness.
"The Professor mustn't know—or Lossie," she said. "I'll get my friends at Flytton to ask me down on Wednesday, and tell Frank so—it's awful being so deceitful, isn't it?" she added deprecatingly.
"You'll be doing no harm," said Rensslaer, getting up to go, for he was at that time a very busy man—at a Hackney Show one day, in Paris the next, all his arrangements to make for Olympia. Yet like most busy men he was never in a hurry, and such an economist in time, that he literally made it where lazy people could find none, and also do those kindnesses that the idle do not.
The Professor rather bristled at the idea of Flytton, but fortunately Lossie did not call that day, so Gay escaped in good time the following morning, and on arriving at the course found Rensslaer there before her, superintending the harnessing by Tugwood of two horses to two speed wagons.
One horse was "Marvellous" (record 2.8½), the other a young one bred in Austria, which was being prepared for the Austrian Derby.
Gay was put in behind Marvellous, and after the hand-loops on the reins were adjusted the right length for her, she was told to jog once round the wrong way of the track, and then turn and stand at the starting-post.
She found the mare had a perfect mouth, but kept giving little twitches with her nose to get her head free, and when the girl stopped as directed, the American came up, and let down the mare's check-rein.