that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim almost fierce, alertness; the
women wore an air of courageous apprehension. At a certain point the
Colonel said, "I'm going to let her out, Pert," and he lifted and then
dropped the reins lightly on the mare's back.

She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said, "she laid down to
her work." Nothing in the immutable iron of Lapham's face betrayed his
sense of triumph as the mare left everything behind her on the road.
Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps
about her, and shielding her face from the scud of ice flung from the
mare's heels, to betray it; except for the rush of her feet, the mare
was as silent as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to
an alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a
hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by
the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what
they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to
interfere with trotting like that. At the end of the heat Lapham drew
her in, and turned off on a side street into Brookline.

"Tell you what, Pert," he said, as if they had been quietly jogging
along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he last spoke, "I've
about made up my mind to build on that lot."

"All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose you know what you're
about. Don't build on it for me, that's all."

When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things, she said to
the girls, who were helping her, "Some day your father will get killed
with that mare."

"Did he speed her?" asked Penelope, the elder.

She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited from
another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits
won her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and
Prudences. Penelope was the girl whose odd serious face had struck
Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed him
on the day of the interview. Her large eyes, like her hair, were
brown; they had the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes which is called
mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.

Her mother did not reply to a question which might be considered
already answered. "He says he's going to build on that lot of his,"
she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had tied