The horses were duly brought round in time: Fern with his silky mane carefully and prettily plaited by the nimble little fingers of Finella—a process which old Sandy Macrupper always watched with delight and approval. And Dulcie, mounted on Flirt, a spotted grey, looked every inch a lady of the best style, in an apple-green habit of Finella's, with her golden hair beautifully coiled under a smart top-hat, put well forward over her forehead. She was perfect, to her little tan-coloured gauntlet gloves, and was—Lady Fettercairn, who glanced from the window, was compelled to admit silently—'very good form indeed.'
Escorted by Shafto and a groom, they set forth; and, save for the unwelcome presence of the former, to Dulcie it was a day of delight, which she thought she never should forget.
Dulcie, we have said, had been wont to scamper about the Devonshire lanes, where the clustered apples grew thick overhead, on her Welsh cob, and now on horseback she felt at home in her own sphere again; her colour mounted, her blue eyes sparkled, and the girl looked beautiful indeed.
She almost felt supremely happy; and Finella laughed as she watched her enjoying the sensations of power and management, and the independence given by horse-exercise—the life, the stir, the action, and joyous excitement of a thorough good 'spin' along a breezy country road.
Shafto, however, was in a sullen temper, and vowed secretly that never again would he act their cavalier, because the girls either ignored him by talking to each other, or only replied to any remarks he ventured to make and these were seldom of an amusing or original nature. Indeed, he felt painfully and savagely how hateful his presence was to both.
Despite Lady Fettercairn, other rides followed, for Finella was difficult to control, and in her impulsive and coaxing ways proved generally irrepressible. Thus she took Dulcie all over the country: to the ruined castle of Fettercairn, to Den Finella, and to the great cascade—a perpendicular rock, more than seventy feet high, over which the Finella River pours on its way from Garvock, where it rises, to the sea at Johnshaven.
Returning slowly from one of these rides, with their pads at a walking pace, with the groom a long way in their rear, Dulcie, breaking a long silence, during which both seemed to be lost in thought, said:
'Troubles are doubly hard to bear when we have to keep them to ourselves; thus I feel happier, at least easier in mind, now that I have told you all about poor Florian.'
'And I, that I have told you about Captain Hammersley,' replied Finella; 'though of course I shall never see him again.'
'Never—why so?'