ith
unerring instinct seated themselves on its most jumpable portion, were
scattered with one threat of the whip to the horizon. Fanny tore away
the last bit of bracken that might prove a discouragement, and Johnny
issued his final order.

"Come inside me with the whip, sir, and give her one good belt at the
last."

No one knows exactly how it happened. There was a rush, a scramble, a
backward sliding, a great deal of shouting, and the Connemara filly was
couched in the narrow ditch at right angles to the fence, with the water
oozing up through the weeds round her, like a wild duck on its nest; and
at this moment Mr. Rupert Gunning appeared suddenly on the top of the
bank and inspected the scene with an amusement that he made little
attempt to conceal.

It took half an hour, and ropes, and a number of Rupert Gunning's
haymakers, to get Fanny Fitz's speculation on to its legs again, and Mr.
Gunning's comments during the process successfully sapped Fanny Fitz's
control of her usually equable temper, "He's a beast!" she said
wrathfully to Freddy, as the party moved soberly homewards in the
burning June afternoon, with the horseflies clustering round them, and
the smell of new-mown grass wafting to them from where, a field or two
away, came the rattle of Rupert Gunning's mowing-machine. "A crabbing
beast! It was just like my luck that he should come up at that moment
and have the supreme joy of seeing Gamble--" Gamble was the filly's
rarely-used name--"wallowing in the ditch! That's the second time he's
scored off me. I _pity_ poor little Maudie Spicer for having such a
brother!"

In spite of this discouraging _debut_, the filly's education went on and
prospered. She marched discreetly along the roads in long reins; she
champed detested mouthfuls of rusty mouthing bit in the process
described by Johnny Connolly as "getting her neck broke"; she trotted
for treadmill half-hours in the lunge; and during and in spite of all
these penances, she fattened up and thickened out until that great
authority, Mr. Alexander, pronounced it would be a sin not to send her
up to the Dublin Horse Show, as she was just the mare to catch an
English dealer's eye.

"But sure ye wouldn't sell her, miss?" said her faithful nurse, "and
Masther Freddy afther starting the hounds and all!"

Fanny Fitz scratched the filly softly under the jawbone, and thought of
the document in her pocket--long, and blue, and inscribed with the too
familiar not