Lady Henrietta favoured him with an enlightening nod. Whether or no he was bent on furthering her purposes, assuredly she might trust him.
"Villain," she said. "You understand me; it's an experiment,—it's a squib!"
Twice Susan rode solemnly round the park. To her, remembering how, as a child, she had ridden, cross-legged, bare-backed, anyhow, anything—their solicitude was absurd. She swung her foot in the stirrup, lifting a transfigured face.
"You are all right," said Rackham, glancing backwards towards the distant windows. "I knew you could ride."
He bent over in his saddle to unlatch the hand-gate that Barnaby had ridden through before them, taking his short cut over the wooden bridge by the willows. Keeping his horse back, he held it open.
"Come out this way," he said. They went cantering up the lane.
Dim and dark was the landscape, threatening rain, and the clouds were sinking lower and lower, rubbing out the hills. A kind of expectation hung in the air. A storm gathering perhaps. They rode up and up, until the narrow green lane came to a sudden stop, and a break in the high barriers of hawthorn let them on to a ridge that hung over a wide sweep of valley. Underneath lay a fallow strip, reddish brown amidst the green waves of pasture, and a party of rooks rose cawing above the idle plough.
Susan, her heart still dancing, laid a happy hand on her horse's mane,—the willing horse that carried her so smoothly.
"You like it?" said Rackham.
There was a subtle difference between his guardianship and that of his cousin. She missed that queer sense of security that she had with Barnaby. Why, she knew not, but Rackham's neighbourhood troubled her. She felt a nervous inclination to burst into hurried chatter.