"My dear squire, I have tested the horse to the uttermost," answered Lionel. "I can positively assure you there is not the slightest ground for apprehension. The animal is a present from my brother, and Douglas would be annoyed if I rode any other horse."
"He would be more annoyed if you came to any harm by a horse of his choosing," answered the squire. "However I'll say no more. If you know the animal, that's enough. I know you to be both a good rider and a good judge of a horse."
"Thank you heartily for your advice, notwithstanding, squire," replied
Lionel, cheerily; "and now I think I'll ride on and join the ladies."
He broke into a canter, and presently was riding by the side of Miss Graham, who did not fail to praise the beauty of "Niagara" in a manner calculated to win the heart of Niagara's rider.
In the exhilarating excitement of the start, Lionel Dale had forgotten alike the gipsy's warning and those vague doubts of his cousin Reginald which had been engendered by that warning. He was entirely absorbed by the pleasure of the hour, happy to see his friends gathered around him, and excited by the prospect of a day's sport.
The meeting-place was crowded with horsemen and carriages, country squires and their sons, gentlemen-farmers on sleek hunters, and humbler tenant-farmers on their stiff cobs, butchers and innkeepers, all eager for the chase. All was life, gaiety excitement, noise; the hounds, giving forth occasional howls and snappish yelpings, expressive of an impatience that was almost beyond endurance; the huntsman cracking his whip, and reproving his charges in language more forcible than polite; the spirited horses pawing the ground; the gentlemen exchanging the compliments of the season with the ladies who had come up to see the hounds throw off.
At last the important moment arrived, the horn sounded, the hounds broke away with a rush, and the business of the day had begun.
Again the rector's horse was seized with sudden obstinacy, and again the rector found it as much as he could do to manage him. An inferior horseman would have been thrown in that sharp and short struggle between horse and rider; but Lionel's firm hand triumphed over the animal's temper for the time at least; and presently he was hurrying onward at a stretching gallop, which speedily carried him beyond the ruck of riders.
As he skimmed like a bird over the low flat meadows, Lionel began to think that the horse was an acquisition, in spite of the sudden freaks of temper which had made him so difficult to manage at starting.
A horseman who had not joined the hunt, who had dexterously kept the others in sight, sheltering himself from observation under the fringe of the wood which crowned a small hill in the neighbourhood of the meet, was watching all the evolutions of Lionel Dale's horse closely through a small field-glass, and soon, perceived that the animal was beyond the rider's skill to manage. The stretching gallop which had reassured Mr. Dale soon carried the rector beyond the watcher's ken, and then, as the hunt was out of sight too, he turned his horse from the shelter he had so carefully selected, and rode straight across country in an opposite direction.