“I am told Eyot has a chance,” he said.
“Well, put me a sovereign on Eyot, please. Are you playing the ponies, Mrs. Devar?”
That lady, being quick-witted, took care not to offend Cynthia by pretending not to understand, though it set Medenham’s teeth on edge to hear a racehorse called a pony. She opened a gold purse and produced a coin.
“I don’t mind risking a little,” she tittered.
Medenham found, however, that she also had handed him a sovereign, and his conscience smote him, for he guessed already, with accuracy as it happened, that she was Miss Vanrenen’s paid chaperon during the absence of the girl’s father on the Continent.
“Personally, I am a duffer in matters connected with the turf,” he explained. “A friend of mine—a chauffeur—mentioned Eyot——”
“Oh, that is all right,” laughed Cynthia. “I like the color—Eau de Nil and white. Look! There he goes!”
She had good eyes, as well as pretty ones, else she could not have distinguished the silk jacket worn by the rider of a horse cantering at that moment along the cleared course. Crowded coaches, four rows deep, lined the rails near the judge’s box, and the gay-hued parasols of their feminine occupants almost completely blocked the view, a distant one in any case, owing to the width of the intervening valley.
Medenham raised no further protest. He walked to a stand where a press of people betokened the presence of a popular layer of odds, found that Eyot’s price was chalked up at five to one, and backed him for four pounds. He had to push and elbow his way through a struggling crowd; immediately after the bet was made, Eyot’s quotation was reduced by two points in response to signals tick-tacked from the inclosures. This, of course, argued a decided following for Dale’s selection, and these eleventh hour movements in the turf market are illuminative. Before he got back to the car there was a mighty shout of “They’re off!” and he saw Cynthia Vanrenen stand on the seat to watch the race through her glasses.
Mrs. Devar stood up, too. Both women were so intent on the troop of horses now streaming over the crest of the six-furlong course that he was able to stare his fill without attracting their attention.