"Couldn't you persuade him to give it up?" he said abruptly; it was not the first time he had startled her by knowing precisely of what she was thinking.
She shook her head
"You know," she said, "Chris is too tall for a jockey—he will train—and, apart from accidents, all the tall jockeys go out quickly. There was Archer—there are many others. It's sheer perversity in a man of six feet to want to be a jock—"
Her voice broke, and Rensslaer bent his head, and looked away—it struck her then that a man's silence is more decent, and worth more sometimes, than all a woman's sympathy, and talk, and kisses.
"Perhaps this will sicken him of the game," he said presently.
It might have enlightened him as to Gay's chances of happiness to know how at that very moment Chris, for the most part in bandages, was using almost his first conscious moments to have held up before his eyes by an unwilling nurse, his note-book of "fixtures" for the ensuing week, the while eagerly calculating his chances of being able to ride before the last day of the month, when steeplechasing ended.
Gay pulled herself together, but when Rensslaer spoke of her horses and their engagements, and the much-coveted Gold Vase, she felt that for the time being, at any rate, she hated anything to do with a race of any kind.
And yet it was no more than two days ago that she had told Carlton she would break her heart if it did not become hers, and he had by no means forgotten....
"You must let me drive you down to Waterloo Park," said Rensslaer, and then told her that on the Gold Vase day, he was for once entering a horse, and going to drive himself, though not in competition for the Vase.
Gay hardly heard him. She wanted to go to the telephone and get the latest news of Chris. The Professor, now taking some rest, was to go down to Epsom later in the day.