Game-keepers and gardeners had been at work all the morning, and after lunch people began to arrive. Fenella had met a good many of them before—Lord Warrener, with his fiery whiskered cheeks and grave little Philadelphia wife; Bill Arkcoll, whose gray face, seamed with a million tiny wrinkles, was twisted into a permanent grin round a black-rimmed eyeglass, which he had, moreover, a disconcerting habit in the evening of letting fall with a sudden crash on his shirt front; "Snip" Hannaford, the gentleman jockey, who had sacrificed his chest to the sport of kings; finally Lady Wills-Pechell, alone condescendingly literary on the strength of half a dozen pottering little garden books: "Among my Syringas," "The Chatelaine's Year," "Shadow and Sun on Spurlock Edge." Lady Warrener was of the latest type of trans-Atlantic heiress, devoted to the peerage from the nursery, and "very carefully brought up" by an ambitious and circumspect mother. Her opinions were predigested and all her life nothing really unforeseen had ever happened her, except twins. She adored her husband and babies, thought Bryan's occasional Americanisms vulgar, and her favorite comment was, "Oh, fahncy!"
As a class they had for some time ceased to force comparisons upon Fenella; but this afternoon their low, clear voices, frank, unimpressed greetings, absence of anxiety, and general air of being all afloat together upon a stream that might be trusted never to carry them too far out of one another's reach struck pleasantly upon her senses. A great coke stove had been lighted in the Belvedere and the curved stone benches covered with carriage-rugs and cushions. The trampled snow outside was littered with an assortment of bob-sleighs, "Cheshires" and frail steel clipper-sleds. The run started practically at the door, with a nearly sheer fall of twenty feet; ran out a hundred yards into the straight, turned—at first gently, then more sharply—on a heaped embankment around the shoulder of the hill, and finished close to the old carp pond, whose black ramparts and pointed turrets of yew were roofed and spired to-day with a white thatch of snow. From the gardens a sort of rough stairway, made of faggots and bundles of brush-wood, had been made to the top of the hill. A few belated guests were straggling up it, pulling up their sleds to one side through the snow. Round the stove the vocabulary of the sport was being briskly interchanged.
"Sprawl on Battledore, and use your right foot, not your left." "Never got beyond the duffer's handicap myself." "You'll 'yaw' all over, Arkcoll, if you use rakes on the straight." "Hands are best." "No, they're not: 'gouties,' when they get a bit worn, are just as good." "He was killed because he held on, Warrener. Let go and bunch yourself, and you can't be more than bruised even there." "Who's going to start?" "That thing's no good on a snow-run, Barbour."
Jack Barbour was standing on the edge of the descent, a light steel frame with a cushion held against his chest. He put it down and glanced at his pretty cousin.
"Shall we show 'em how?"
Fenella caught her breath, but nodded.
"Oh, Jack, take care of her!" reproachfully, from his sister, while Warrener, in the background, already a little épris, expressed an opinion that it was "damned dangerous."
"Dangerous? Down that thing?" cried Barbour scornfully, pushing the nose of what is technically known as a "tin-bottom" over the slope.
"What am I to do?" asked Nelly.
"Just sit still and hang on to my knees. Now, are you ready?"