“So I were,” perverting his English; “but I left my fez behind me to show my ’fiz’ here. Twiggey voo?”
“How is your sister?”
“Pretty bobbish.”
“I hear she has a superb mount.”
“Too superb, mon camarade. She’s a lucky girl if her collar-bone isn’t fractured before twenty-four hours. The brute is a good brute, but just as fit for a woman to ride as a wild zebra. Here she comes. By Jove! she can’t hold him.”
A young girl cantered up, very red in the face from hard pulling.
“Well, Alice, you’ve had enough of that brass elephant, hasn’t you?”
“Not a bit of it,” cried Miss Lindsay, a bright, aristocratic-looking, blue-eyed, tow-haired young lady, with lines of decision around a saucy mouth, and with a form that bespoke the use of dumb-bells and all those minor appanages relating to the development of muscular Christianity.
“Shall I ride with you?”
“No, Fred; I can do the mile with Bertie,” a younger brother astride a shaggy Shetland.