ivered.

"Dr. Knott wants me to ride."

Katherine drew back, stood up straight, threw out her hands as though
to keep off some actual and tangible object of offense.

"Not that, Richard," she cried. "Anything in the world rather than
that."

He looked at her imploringly, yet with a certain determination, for the
child was dying fast in him and the forceful desires and intentions of
youth growing.

"Don't say I mustn't, mother. Pray, pray don't, because----"

He left the sentence unfinished, overtaken by the old habit of
obedience, yet he did not lower his eyes.

But Lady Calmady made no response. For the moment she was outraged to
the point of standing apart, even from her child. For a moment, even
motherhood went down before purely personal feeling--and this, by the
irony of circumstance, immediately after motherhood had made supreme
confession of immutability. But remembering her husband's death,
remembering the source of all her child's misfortune, it appeared to
her indecent, a wanton insult to all her past suffering, that such a
proposition should be made to her. And, in a flash of cruelly vivid
perception, she knew how the boy would look on a horse, the grotesque,
to the vulgar, wholly absurd spectacle he must, notwithstanding his
beauty, necessarily present. For a moment the completeness of love
failed before pride touched to the very quick.

"But, how can you ride?" she said. "My poor child, think--how is it
possible?"

Richard sat upright, pressing his hands down on the bedclothes on
either side to steady himself. The colour rushed over his face and
throat.

"It is possible, mother," he answered resolutely, "or Dr. Knott would
never have talked about it. He couldn't have been so unkind. He drew me
the plan of a saddle. He said I was to show it to Uncle Roger to-night.
Of course it won't be easy at first, but I don't care about that. And
Chifney would teach me. I know he would. He said the other day he'd
make a sportsman of me yet."

"When did you talk with Chifney?" Lady Calmady spoke very quietly, but
there was that in her tone which came near frightening the boy. It
required all his daring to answer honestly and at once.

"I talked to him the day Aunt Ella and Helen were here. I--I went down
to the stables with him and saw all the horses."

"Then either you or he did very wrong," Lady Calmady remarked.

"It was my fault, mother, all my fault. Chifney would have ridden on,
but I stopped him.