‘And Captain Standish gave you a riding lesson, did he?’ inquired Mr. Piper.
‘Yes, he went over the moor with me, just to show me how to manage Erebus.’
‘That was very civil of him. But you mustn’t be riding about with him often, you know, Bella. It wouldn’t do. You mean no harm, and he means no harm. I know that, my dear. But it would set people talking—and I’m as proud a man as Cæsar in my way. I won’t have my wife talked about.’
Bella buried her pale face in the black’s silky mane. She did not care to meet her husband’s honest eyes just at this particular moment.
‘I would not for the world do anything you dislike,’ she said, meekly; ‘but I want to learn how to manage Erebus, and I don’t think any one could teach me so well as Captain Standish. And, by and by, when the foxhunting begins, if you did not mind, I should like very much to—to——’ Here Mr. Piper glared at her with a look so awful that she remodelled the end of her sentence—’ to see the hounds throw off.’
‘You could drive to the meet in your pony chay,’ said Mr. Piper. ‘Nobody could say there was harm in that.’
‘It would be much nicer to go on horseback,’ pleaded Bella, laying her little white hand caressingly on Mr. Piper’s velvet collar.
‘Why, what a baby you are, little woman!’ he exclaimed, mollified by that light touch, and the coaxing look in the Dresden china face. ‘Yon horse is a new toy. You’ll be wanting to ride him into the drawing-room, I shouldn’t wonder, or to have him lying on the hearth-rug of a winter evening, like a Newfoundland.’
This, in Bella’s idea, meant permission to go to the meet, and once at the meet it would be very easy to follow the hounds for half an hour or so, and to declare afterwards that it was Erebus’s doing, quite an involuntary bit of hunting on her own part. Bella was past mistress of those small arts by which an adroit unscrupulous woman manages to get her own way.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mr. Piper presently, ‘if you want to have company when you’re out riding, you’d better ask one of Porkman’s girls to come and spend a week with you and bring her hoss. They’re first-rate horsewomen, both of ’em.’