-away sweetness.

Fanny Fitz and the ostler were outside the gate simultaneously: the
filly was already rounding the first turn of the road; two strides more,
and she was gone as though she had never been, and "Oh, my nineteen
pounds!" thought poor Fanny Fitz.

As the ostler was wont to say in subsequent repetitions of the story:
"Thanks be to God, the reins was rotten!" But for this it is highly
probable that Miss Fitzroy's speculation would have collapsed abruptly
with broken knees, possibly with a broken neck. Having galloped into
them in the course of the first hundred yards, they fell from her as
the green withes fell from Samson, one long streamer alone remaining to
lash her flanks as she fled. Some five miles from the hotel she met a
wedding, and therewith leaped the bog-drain by the side of the road and
"took to the mountains," as the bridegroom poetically described it to
Fanny Fitz, who, with the ostler, was pursuing the fugitive on an
outside car.

"If that's the way," said the ostler, "ye mightn't get her again before
the winther."

Fanny Fitz left the matter, together with a further instalment of the
thirty pounds, in the hands of the sergeant of police, and went home,
and, improbable as it may appear, in the course of something less than
ten days she received an invoice from the local railway station,
Enniscar, briefly stating: "1 horse arrd. Please remove."

Many people, most of her friends indeed, were quite unaware that Fanny
Fitz possessed a home. Beyond the fact that it supplied her with a
permanent address, and a place at which she was able periodically to
deposit consignments of half-worn-out clothes, Fanny herself was not
prone to rate the privilege very highly. Possibly, two very elderly
maiden step-aunts are discouraging to the homing instinct; the fact
remained that as long as the youngest Miss Fitzroy possessed the
where-withal to tip a housemaid she was but rarely seen within the
decorous precincts of Craffroe Lodge.

Let it not for a moment be imagined that the Connemara filly was to
become a member of this household. Even Fanny Fitz, with all her
optimism, knew better than to expect that William O'Loughlin, who
divided his attentions between the ancient cob and the garden, and ruled
the elder Misses Fitzroy with a rod of iron, would undertake the
education of anything more skittish than early potatoes. It was to the
stable, or rather cow-house, of one Johnny Connolly, that the new
pur