Her aunt, strange to say, was not a very garrulous old lady, and the dark, foreboding thoughts which persistently crept into the mind of the mistress, so perplexed her that she appeared dull. Since her husband’s death she had acquired the habit of pursuing at will her train of thought, and now she could not easily break it, even in the presence of others. Her thoughts now, as they had been much of late, were associated with the little “Cassandra.” She was sorely vexed with the chiding she at times administered to herself for the strong, though, perhaps, strange attachment she felt to be growing dally within her.
Was she then destined, as the very name would imply, to fall in love with Cassandra? Was she indeed to be fascinated, lured to what had at first appeared to her the very shores of sin, “by the light of such wondrous eyes?” Involuntarily she recalled the words of “Ouida;” “There are no eyes that speak more truly, none on earth that are so beautiful as the eyes of the horse—dark as a gazelle’s, soft as a woman’s, brilliant as stars, a little dreamy and mournful, infinitely caressing when they look at those they love.”
The carriage stopped. They had reached the stables. Instead of awaiting, as usual, the appearance of the trainer, she found that she had alighted and hastily sought the compartment set aside for Cassandra; and, that it was her glossy, silvery little head, that was now swaying so gently within her arms. Memory again reverted to her husband. To the time when his hands fondled the same head, his eyes sparkled at her playful pranks, his lips uttered the word that had named her.
The voice of the trainer suddenly sounding in her ears startled her and she turned rather abruptly toward him.
“She’s improving, ma’am,” he said, after his usual salutation, “with every day. The climate is telling on her, for she leaves a clean trough now after each meal; and her speed—well, no longer than daylight this morning she showed her heels for better’n a quarter to some of the very best ones in the barn, ma’am.”
“But you do not intend to race her, do you?” she exclaimed. “She’s too pretty and to much of a plaything, I should think, for that?”
“True, she is a beauty, ma’am,” replied the trained, “but as for plaything”—he laughed aloud at the thought as he muttered brokenly—“well, if I can get the proper weight on her in that big handicap Saturday, and the track’s right, she might be about the most playful proposition these cracks have yet got up against. And then, there ought to be a good price, too.”
“Oh, but you must not sell her.”
“Sell her! I could have thumped that lawyer for selling her. No, ma’am; I mean there ought to be heavy odds against her in such company.”
“Thomas tells me that Hildreth won yesterday.”