"Mr. and Mrs. Mellish, you idiot!" answered the trainer fiercely. "Who else should I bother my head about? Did they come home last night while I was away?"
The "Softy" told his master that he had seen one of the carriages drive past the north gates at a little after ten o'clock on the preceding night, and that he supposed it contained Mr. and Mrs. Mellish.
"Then you'd better go up to the house and make sure," said Mr. Conyers; "I want to know."
"Go up to th' house?"
"Yes, coward!—yes, sneak! Do you suppose that Mrs. Mellish will eat you?"
"I don't suppose nought o' t' sort," answered the "Softy" sulkily; "but I'd rather not go."
"But I tell you I want to know," said Mr. Conyers; "I want to know if Mrs. Mellish is at home, and what she's up to, and whether there are any visitors at the house, and all about her. Do you understand?"
"Yes, it's easy enough to understand, but it's rare and difficult to do," replied Steeve Hargraves. "How am I to find out? Who's to tell me?"
"How do I know?" cried the trainer, impatiently; for Stephen Hargraves's slow, dogged stupidity was throwing the dashing James Conyers into a fever of vexation. "How do I know? Don't you see that I'm too ill to stir from this bed? I'd go myself if I wasn't. And can't you go and do what I tell you without standing arguing there until you drive me mad?"
Steeve Hargraves muttered some sulky apology, and shuffled out of the room. Mr. Conyers's handsome eyes followed him with a dark frown. It is not a pleasant state of health which succeeds a drunken debauch; and the trainer was angry with himself for the weakness which had taken him to Doncaster upon the preceding evening, and thereby inclined to vent his anger upon other people.