t Scott! have you been married to a Bland for nearly eight
years and are you still saying, 'let her'?"

"I mounted and rode on with the hunt," said Sally, looking at me with
shining eyes in which there was a defiant and reckless expression. "He
got quite away with me, but I held on and came in at the death, though
without a hat. Now my arms are so sore I shall hardly be able to do my
hair."

"Of course you're not to ride that horse again, Sally," I responded
sternly, forgetting my dusty clothes, forgetting Bonny's dancing black
eyes that never left my face while I stood there.

"Of course I am, Ben," rejoined Sally, laughing, while a high colour
rose to her forehead. "Of course I'm going to ride him to-morrow
afternoon when I go out with Bonny."

"Ah, don't, please," entreated Bonny, in evident distress; "he's really
an ugly brute, you know, dear, if he is so beautiful."

"I feel awfully mean about it, Ben," said George, "because, you see, I
got him for her."

"And you got him," I retorted, indignantly, "without knowing evidently a
thing about him."

"One can never know anything about a brute like that. He went like a
lamb as long as I was on him, but the trouble is that Sally has too
light a hand."

"He'd be all right with me," remarked Bonny, stretching out her arm, in
which the muscle was hard as steel. "See what a grip I have."

"I'll never give up, I'll never give up," said Sally, and though she
uttered the words with gaiety, the expression of defiance, of
recklessness, was still in her eyes.

When George and Bonny had gone, I tried in vain to shake this resolve,
which had in it something of the gentle, yet unconquerable, obstinacy of
Miss Matoaca.

"Promise me, Sally, that you will not attempt to ride that horse again,"
I entreated.

Turning from me, she walked slowly to the end of the room and bent over
the box of sweet alyssum, which still blossomed under a canary cage on
the window-sill. A cedar log was burning on the andirons, and the red
light of the flames fell on the tapestried furniture, on the quaint
inlaid spinet in one corner, and on the portrait above it of Miss Mitty
and Miss Matoaca clasping hands under a garland of roses.

"Will you promise me, dearest?" I asked again, for she did not answer.

Lifting her head from the flowers, she stood with her hand on one of the
delicate curtains, and her figure, in its straight black habit, drawn
very erect.

"I'll ride him," she responded qu