now?"

"I'd take a ticket for her," said Rupert Gunning, "back to Craffroe--if
you haven't a return."

The second and third days crawled by unmarked by any incident of cheer,
but on the morning of the fourth, when Fanny arrived at the stall, she
found that Patsey had already gone out to exercise. She hurried to the
ring and signalled to him to come to her.

"There's a fella' afther her, miss!" said Patsey, bending very low and
whispering at close and tobacco-scented range. "He came last night to
buy her; a jock he was, from the Curragh, and he said for me to be in
the ring this morning. He's not come yet. He had a straw hat on him."

Fanny sat down under the trees and waited for the jockey in the straw
hat. All around were preoccupied knots of bargainers, of owners making
their final arrangements, of would-be-buyers hurrying from ring to ring
in search of the paragon that they had now so little time to find. But
the man from the Curragh came not. Fanny sent the mare in, and sat on
under the trees, sunk in depression. It seemed to her she was the only
person in the show who had nothing to do, who was not clinking handfuls
of money, or smoothing out banknotes, or folding up cheques and
interring them in fat and greasy pocket-books. She had never known this
aspect of the Horse Show before, and--so much is in the point of
view--it seemed to her sordid and detestable. Prize-winners with their
coloured rosettes were swaggering about everywhere. Every horse in the
show seemed to have got a prize except hers, thought Fanny. And not a
man in a straw hat came near Ring 3.

She went home to lunch, dead tired. The others were going to see the
polo in the park.

"I must go back and sell the mare," said Fanny valiantly, "or else take
that ticket to Craffroe, Mr. Gunning!"

"Well, we'll come down and pick you up there after the first match, you
poor, miserable thing," said Mrs. Spicer, "and I hope you'll find that
beast of a horse dead when you get there! You look half dead yourself!"

How sick Fanny was of signing her name at that turnstile! The pen was
more atrocious every time. How tired her feet were! How sick she was of
the whole thing, and how incredibly big a fool she had been! She was
almost too tired to know what she was doing, and she had actually walked
past stall No. 548 without noticing it, when she heard Patsey's voice
calling her.

"Miss Fanny! Miss Fanny! I have her sold! The mare's sold, miss! See
here! I h