"I did go for a while, but you see—well, I'm going up to Cambridge as soon as Dr. Murray will let me, and I don't want to get too far behind. So I'm attending classes and that sort of thing—as much as I'm allowed," with a rueful smile.
"I think," said Nell, in her charming, softest voice, "you're just a hero!"
"A—a what? Good Heavens, what have I done? What have I been saying?"
She turned suddenly, unheeding his ludicrous dismay, and stretching across, opened a little drawer in the table. She took out a bundle of photographs and handed him one.
"That's Acushla!" she said with a queer little breathless note in her voice. "I had to sell her."
He glanced at her swiftly, and looked down at the photograph. Nell was making amends. In her rush of disgust at all the unkind things she had thought of him, in the pity that made her heart ache, she instinctively took him close as a friend.
"That is the Colleen Bawn. She belonged to all of us. Dad bought her for fourteen pounds of an awful old pedler! She looked dreadful; you could count all her ribs—and dirty—and her tail! Well, it isn't very grand there, but I don't believe it had more than fourteen hairs in it when dad bought her—pound a hair, we always said. She was lame, and had a great bare patch on her right shoulder. But we fattened her up, and groomed her, and you wouldn't believe how she could go! And jump! She'd jump anything, if she saw anything in front of her. That was her fad. She couldn't stand anyone's getting in front of her. She's taken me clear over a wall that even Denis's best hunter can't manage without knocking down a stone or two. She's rather big and bony, but there's something rather fine about her head, I think."
He nodded.
"That's a jolly colt!"
"He is Sheila Pat's. We haven't sold him. We dared not. I believe it would have made her ill—really ill, I mean. The parting nearly did, in any case."