CHAPTER VII.
"GAI DONC; LA VOYAGEUSE, AU COUP DU PÈLERIN!"
When Mr. Tregonell came to the breakfast room next morning he found everybody alert with the stir and expectation of an agreeable day. The Trevena harriers were to meet for the first time this season, and everybody was full of that event. Christabel, Mrs. Torrington, and the St. Aubyn girls were breakfasting in their habits and hats: whips and gloves were lying about on chairs and side-tables—everybody was talking, and everybody seemed in a hurry. De Cazalet looked gorgeous in olive corduroy and Newmarket boots. Mr. St. Aubyn looked business-like in a well-worn red coat and mahogany tops, while the other men inclined to dark shooting jackets, buckskins, and Napoleons. Mr. FitzJesse, in a morning suit that savoured of the study rather than the hunting field, contemplated these Nimrods with an amused smile; but the Reverend St. Bernard beheld them not without pangs of envy. He, too, had been in Arcadia; he, too, had followed the hounds in his green Oxford days, before he joined that band of young Anglicans who he doubted not would by-and-by be as widely renowned as the heroes of the Tractarian movement.
"You are going to the meet?" inquired Leonard, as his wife handed him his coffee.
"Do you think I would take the trouble to put on my habit in order to ride from here to Trevena?" exclaimed Christabel. "I am going with the rest of them, of course. Emily St. Aubyn will show me the way."
"But you have never hunted."
"Because your dear mother was too nervous to allow me. But I have ridden over every inch of the ground. I know my horse, and my horse knows me. You needn't be afraid."
"Mrs. Tregonell is one of the finest horsewomen I ever saw," said de Cazalet. "It is a delight to ride by her side. Are not you coming with us?" he asked.
"Yes, I'll ride after you," said Leonard. "I forgot all about the harriers. Nobody told me they were to begin work this morning."
The horses were brought round to the porch, the ladies put on their gloves, and adjusted themselves in those skimpy lop-sided petticoats which have replaced the flowing drapery of the dark ages when a horsewoman's legs and boots were in somewise a mystery to the outside world.