e
winding over the gorse. The meet was brilliant and very large; showing
such a gathering as only the Melton country can; and foremost among the
crowd of carriages, hacks, and hunters, were the beautiful roan mare
Vivandiere of the Lady Guenevere, mounted by that exquisite peeress in
her violet habit and her tiny velvet hat; and the pony equipage of the
Zu-Zu, all glittering with azure and silver, leopard rugs, and snowy
reins: the breadth of half an acre of grassland was between them, but
the groups of men about them were tolerably equal for number and for
rank.

"Take Zu-Zu off my hands for this morning, Seraph; there's a good
fellow," murmured Cecil, as he swung himself into saddle. The Seraph
gave a leonine growl, sighed, and acquiesced. He detested women in the
hunting-field, but that sweetest tempered giant of the Brigades never
refused anything to anybody--much less to "Beauty."

To an uninitiated mind it would have seemed marvelous and beautiful in
its combination of simplicity and intricacy, to have noted the
delicate tactics with which Bertie conducted himself between his
two claimants--bending to his Countess with a reverent devotion that
assuaged whatever of incensed perception of her unacknowledged rival
might be silently lurking in her proud heart; wheeling up to the
pony-trap under cover of speaking to the men from Egerton Lodge, and
restoring the Zu-Zu from sulkiness, by a propitiatory offer of a little
gold sherry-flash, studded with turquoises, just ordered for her from
Regent Street, which, however, she ungraciously contemned, because she
thought it had only cost twenty guineas; anchoring the victimized Seraph
beside her by an adroit "Ah! by the way, Rock, give Zu-Zu one of your
rose-scented papelitos; she's been wild to smoke them"; and leaving the
Zu-Zu content at securing a future Duke, was free to canter back and
flirt on the offside of Vivandiere, till the "signal," the "cast,"
made with consummate craft, the waving of the white sterns among the
brushwood, the tightening of girths, the throwing away of cigars, the
challenge, the whimper, and the "stole away!" sent the field headlong
down the course after as fine a long-legged greyhound fox as ever
carried a brush.

Away he went in a rattling spin, breaking straight at once for the open,
the hounds on the scent like mad: with a tally-ho that thundered through
the cloudless, crisp, cold, glittering noon, the field dashed off
pell-mell; the viol