itted him too
close; and to recover herself must now swing to the other extreme.

Obedient to her will, he kept several lengths behind her. When she found
he did not draw up alongside, she slackened her pace. He felt her
resistance was dying down in answer to his non-resistance. She was
shoving against emptiness, and getting no good from it.

As they came to the crest of the Downs and began the descent of the
hill, Boy dropped into a walk.

Below them the long roofs of Putnam's showed, weathered among the
sycamores.

As the girl passed into the Paddock Close he was riding at her side
again.

The Paddock Close was a vast enclosure, fenced off from the Downs, an
ideal nursery and galloping ground for young stock.

There was hill and valley; here and there a group of trees for shade in
the dog-days; a great sheltered bottom fringed by a wood that ran out
into the Close like a peninsula; and the wall of the Downs to give
protection from the east.

As they walked together down the hill, Boy was looking about her.

"Where's the mare?" she asked.

They were the first words she had spoken.

"Which mare?" asked Silver

"Four Pound."

He glanced round. The young stock were standing lazily under the trees,
swishing their tails, and stamping off the flies. But the old mare had
forsaken her usual haunt.

Then far away on the edge of a bed of bracken in the bottom, something
like a piece of brown paper caught his eye. It rose and fell and flapped
in the wind.

Boy saw it, too, and darted off.

"Call Billy Bluff!" she cried over her shoulder; but Billy had already
trotted off to the yard to renew the pleasant task of tormenting Maudie
and the fan-tails.

The girl made at a canter for the brown paper struggling on the edge of
the bracken.

As she came closer she raised a swift hand to steady the man pounding
behind her.

The brown paper was a new-born foal, woolly, dun of hue, swaying on
uncertain legs. The little creature, with the mane and tail of a toy
horse, looking supremely pathetic in its helplessness, wavered
ridiculously in the wind. It was all knees and hocks, and fluffy tail
that wriggled, and jelly-like eyes. Its tall, thin legs were stuck out
before and behind like those of a wooden horse. It stood like one dazed,
staring blankly before it, absorbed in the new and surprising action of
drawing breath through widespread nostrils; quavered and then collapsed,
only to attempt to climb to its feet agai