-mouthed amazement, for the young girl
who acknowledged in an offhand way that she had performed such
tremendous feats of horsemanship was modest, pretty, unaffected, and
feminine.

"I wonder," thought Queeker, "if Fan--ah, I mean Katie--could do that
sort of thing?"

He looked loyally at Katie, but thought, disloyally, of her cousin,
accused himself of base unfaithfulness, and, seizing a hot roll, began
to eat violently.

"Would you like to see the meet, Mr Queeker?" said Mr Stoutheart
senior; "I can give you a good mount. My own horse, Slapover, is
neither so elegant nor so high-spirited as Wildfire, but he can go over
anything, and is quite safe."

A sensitive spring had been touched in the bosom of Queeker, which
opened a floodgate that set loose an astonishing and unprecedented flow
of enthusiastic eloquence.

"I shall like it of all things," he cried, with sparkling eyes and
heightened colour. "It has been my ambition ever since I was a little
boy to mount a thoroughbred and follow the hounds. I assure you the
idea of `crossing country,' as it is called, I believe, and taking
hedges, ditches, five-barred gates and everything as we go, has a charm
for me which is absolutely inexpressible--"

Queeker stopped abruptly, because he observed a slight flush on Fanny's
cheeks and a pursed expression on Fanny's lips, and felt uncertain as to
whether or not she was laughing at him internally.

"Well said, Queeker," cried Mr Stoutheart enthusiastically; "it's a
pity you are a town-bred man. Such spirit as yours can find vent only
in the free air of the country!"

"Amy, dear," said Katie, with an extremely innocent look at her friend,
"do huntsmen in this part of England usually take `everything as they
go?' I think Mr Queeker used that expression."

"N-not exactly," replied Amy, with a smile and glance of uncertainty, as
if she did not quite see the drift of the question.

"Ah! I thought not," returned Katie with much gravity. "I had always
been under the impression that huntsmen were in the habit of going
_round_ stackyards, and houses, and such things--not _over_ them."

Queeker was stabbed--stabbed to the heart! It availed not that the
company laughed lightly at the joke, and that Mr Stoutheart said that
he (Queeker) should realise his young dream, and reiterated the
assurance that his horse would carry him over _anything_ if he only held
tightly on and let him go. He had been stabbed by Katie--the