“Good morning, Jack,” said a clear, strong voice.
“Hello,” the tone of Jack was amazingly casual—“here you are again.”
There was a moment’s maneuvering, in the course of which three pairs of feminine eyes met in challenge, and then Cousin Blanche and Cousin Marjorie, smart groom and all, passed on without offering a chance of coming to closer quarters. Their tactics had been calculated so nicely that it was impossible to say whether discourtesy was or was not intended. But there was a subtle air about these ironically self-confident young women which prevented Mary from giving them the benefit of the doubt.
For a moment she felt inclined to rage within. And then she bit her lip and laughed. A moment later a sudden peck of the tall horse told her that it would be wise for the present to give him an undivided mind. Soon, however, Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche were forgotten in the delights and the perils of the discreet canter into which she found herself launched. It was a perfect morning for the Row. The play of the sun on the bright leaves, the power of its rays softened by a breeze from the east, the sense of rapid motion, the kaleidoscope of swiftly changing figures through which they passed, filled her with a zest of life, a feeling of high romance which left no room for smaller and meaner affairs. And the stride of the tall horse, as soon as she got used to it, was such a thing of delight in itself, that she even forgot the strange saddle and her general fears.
They rode for an enchanted hour. And somehow, in the course of it, the life forces became more insurgent. Somehow they deepened, expanded, grew more imperious. Jack was a real out-of-doors man, who believed that hunting, shooting, field sports, and fresh air were the highest good. His look of lordly health, mingled with a charmingly delicate protectiveness, appealed to her in a very special way. For some weeks she had known that she was beginning to like him perilously much. But it was not until she had returned rather tired and rather hot to Victoria Mansions, had had a delicious bath, and a very good luncheon indeed that she began at last to realize that she was fairly up against the acute problem of Jack Dinneford.
CHAPTER IV.
BRIDPORT HOUSE
I
In the meantime Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche enjoyed their ride very much. It was the one thing they really did enjoy in London.
They were two ordinary young women, yet even so late in the Old World’s history as the year 1913, their own private cosmos could not quite make up its mind to regard them in that light. Cousin Marjorie and Cousin Blanche had surprisingly little to say for themselves. They were modest, unassuming girls, without views or ideas, very proper, very dull, absurdly conventional; in the eyes of some people as plain as the proverbial pikestaff, passably good-looking in the sight of others; in fact, a more commonplace pair of young women would have been hard to find anywhere, yet deep in the hearts of the Ladies Dinneford was the sure faith that the world at large did not subscribe to any such opinion.
It was not merely that they rode rather well. They passed other members of their sex in the Row that morning who rode quite as well as themselves. No, proficiency in the saddle, the one accomplishment they could boast, of which they were unaffectedly modest, was far from explaining the particular angle at which the world chose to view them. Not that in any way they were fêted or acclaimed. As far as the vast majority of their fellow-creatures were concerned they were not people to look at twice. But here and there a glance of recognition or curiosity would greet them, winged by a smile, now of mere interest, now of an irony faintly perceptible.