“Getting on! It looks to me to be the other way.”
Turning his horse quickly round, after nodding to me, in the direction of the shows and drinking booths, he nearly turned it upon a tall, gaunt skeleton in a red cloak—Ketira the gipsy. She must have sprung out of the crowd.
But oh, how ill she looked! Hyde was strangely altered; but not as she was. The yellow face was shrivelled and shrunken, the fire had left her eyes. Hyde checked his horse; but the animal turned restive. He controlled it with his hand, and sat still before Ketira.
“Yes, look at me,” she burst forth. “For the last time. The end is close at hand both for you and for me. We shall meet Kettie where we are going.”
He leaned from his horse to speak to her: his voice a low sad wail, his words apparently those of deprecating prayer. Ketira heard him quietly to the end, gazing into his face, and then slowly turned away.
“Fare you well, Hyde Stockhausen. Farewell for ever.”
Before leaving the course Hyde had an accident. While talking to Jim Massock, some drums and trumpets struck up their noise at a neighbouring show; the horse started violently, and Hyde was thrown. He thought he was not much hurt and mounted again.
“What else could you expect?” demanded Duffham, when Hyde got back to Virginia Cottage. “You have not strength to sit a donkey, and you must go careering off to Worcester races on a fiery horse!”
But the fall had done Hyde some inward damage, and it hastened the end. He died that day week.
“Some men’s sins go before them to Judgment, and some follow after,” solemnly said Mr. Holland the next Sunday from the pulpit. “He who is gone from among us had taken his to his Saviour—and he is now at rest.”