age. You'll have to sit
tight and see about it, Anna. He isn't too free with the ready as it
is--and if you've a boy hanging about, God help you. Why don't you be
rude to him? You know the way as well as most--eh, what?"

"I'm positively afraid to. Do you know, my dear man, that if this
Perfect Angel left us, strange things would happen. My father says so,
and I believe he speaks the truth. There is a mystery--and I hate
mysteries."

"Get hold of the feathered lady and hear what she has to say."

"Impossible but brilliant. She has gone to Germany."

"Oh, damn--then he'll be making love to you. I say, Anna, there's not
going to be any billing and cooing or anything of that sort. I'm not
very exacting, but the way you look at men is just prussic acid to me.
If this kid should begin--"

She laughed drolly.

"He is my great big brother," she said--and then jumping up--"let us go
and see the horses. You'll be talking nonsense if we don't. And, Willy,
I forbid you to talk nonsense."

She turned and faced him in mock anger, and he, responding instantly,
caught her in his arms and kissed her ardently.

"What a pair of cherubs," he exclaimed, "what a nest of cooing doves--I
say, Anna, I must kill that kid--or shall it be the fatted calf?
There'll be murder done somewhere if he stops at Hampstead."

"If it were done, then when it were done--O let me go, Willy, your arms
are crushing me."

He released her instantly and, snatching up a cap, set out with her to
the downs where the horses were being stripped for the gallop. The
morning of early summer was delightfully fragrant--a cool breeze came up
from the sea and every breath invigorated. Old John Farrier, mounted on
a sturdy cob, met them at the foot of a great grassy slope and
complained that it was over late in the day for horses to gallop, but,
as he added, "they'll have to do it at Ascot and they may as well do it
here." A silent man, old John had once accompanied Willy Forrest to a
dinner at the Carlton which Anna gave to a little sporting circle. Then
he uttered but one remark, seeming to think some observation necessary,
and it fell from his lips in the pause of a social discussion. "I always
eat sparrer-grass with my fingers," he had said, and wondered at the
general hilarity.

Old John was unusually silent upon this morning of the trial, and when
he named the weights at which the horses would gallop, his voice sank to
a sepulchral whisper. "The old 'oss is