"Oh, nothing except that Mademoiselle has just missed killing my husband with that wicked animal of hers!" cried the Maegera, in a fury.
"Mademoiselle might turn the accusation against him," Madame de Nointel said, with some malice. "It was he who frightened her horse."
The fiery animal, with distended veins and quivering nostrils, snorted violently, cavorted sidewise, and tried to run. Zibeline needed all her firmness of grasp to force him, without allowing herself to be thrown, to stand still on the spot whence had come the movement that had alarmed him.
"Your horse needs exercise," said Henri to the equestrienne. "You ought to give him an opportunity to do something besides the formal trot around this path."
"I should be able to do so, if ever we could have our match," said
Zibeline. "Will you try it now?"
"Come on!"
She nodded, gave him her hand an instant, and they set off, side by side, followed by Zibeline's groom, no less well mounted than she, and wearing turned-over boots, bordered with a band of fawn-colored leather, according to the fashion.
CHAPTER XXV
THE AMAZON HAS A FALL
They were a well-matched pair: he, the perfect type of the elegant and always youthful soldier; she, the most dashing of all the Amazons in the Bois, to quote the words of Edmond Delorme.