playing cup and ball;
she was, besides, not one of the people who are conversational in
emergencies. When an animal, as active and artful as the Connemara mare,
is going at some twenty miles an hour, with one of the reins under its
tail, endeavours to detach the rein are not much avail, and when the
tail is still tender from recent docking, they are a good deal worse
than useless. Having twice nearly fallen on his head, Rupert abandoned
the attempt and prayed for the long stiff ascent of the Craffroe Hill.

It came swiftly out of the grey moonlight. At its foot another road
forked to the right; instead of facing the hill that led to home and
stable, the mare swung into the side road, with one wheel up on the
grass, and the cushions slipping from the seat, and Rupert, just saving
the situation with the left rein that remained to him, said to himself
that they were in for a bad business.

For a mile they swung and clattered along it, with the wind striking and
splitting against their faces like a cold and tearing stream of water; a
light wavered and disappeared across the pallid fields to the left, a
group of starveling trees on a hill slid up into the skyline behind
them, and at last it seemed as if some touch of self-control, some
suggestion of having had enough of the joke, was shortening the mare's
grasping stride. The trap pitched more than ever as she came up into the
shafts and back into her harness; she twisted suddenly to the left into
a narrow lane, cleared the corner by an impossible fluke, and Fanny Fitz
was hurled ignominiously on to Rupert Gunning's lap. Long briars and
twigs struck them from either side, the trap bumped in craggy ruts and
slashed through wide puddles, then reeled irretrievably over a heap of
stones and tilted against the low bank to the right.

Without any exact knowledge of how she got there, Fanny found herself on
her hands and knees in a clump of bracken on top of the bank; Rupert was
already picking himself out of rugs and other jetsam in the field below
her, and the mare was proceeding up the lane at a disorderly trot,
having jerked the trap on to its legs again from its reclining position.

Fanny was lifted down into the lane; she told him that she was not hurt,
but her knees shook, her hands trembled, and the arm that was round her
tightened its clasp in silence. When a man is strongly moved by
tenderness and anxiety and relief, he can say little to make it known;
he need not--it