At this moment the glowing end of a cigar deviated from its...o...b..t on the deck and approached them.

"Is that you, Gunning? I thought it was your voice," said the owner of the cigar.

"Yes, it is," said Mr. Gunning, in a tone singularly lacking in encouragement. "Thought I saw you at dinner, but couldn't be sure."

As a matter of fact, no one could have been more thoroughly aware than he of Captain Carteret's presence in the saloon.

"I thought so too!" said f.a.n.n.y Fitz, from the darkness, "Captain Carteret wouldn't look my way!"

Captain Carteret gave a somewhat exaggerated start of discovery, and threw his cigar over the side. He had evidently come to stay.

"How was it I didn't see you at the Horse Show?" he said.

"The only people one ever sees there are the people one doesn't want to see," said f.a.n.n.y, "I could meet no one except the auctioneer from Craffroe, and he always said the same thing. 'Fearful sultry, Miss Fitzroy! Have ye a purchaser yet for your animal, Miss Fitzroy? Ye have not! Oh, fie, fie!' It was rather funny at first, but it palled."

"I was only there one day," said Captain Carteret; "I wish I'd known you had a horse up, I might have helped you to sell."

"Thanks! I sold all right," said f.a.n.n.y Fitz magnificently. "Did rather well too!"

"Capital!" said Captain Carteret vaguely. His acquaintance with f.a.n.n.y extended over a three-day shooting party in Kildare, and a dance given by the detachment of his regiment at Enniscar, for which he had come down from the depot. It was not sufficient to enlighten him as to what it meant to her to own and sell a horse for the first time in her life.

"By-the-bye, Gunning," he went on, "you seemed to be having a lively time in Na.s.sau Street yesterday! My wife and I were driving in from the polo, and we saw you in the thick of what looked like a street row. Some one in the club afterwards told me it was a horse you had only just bought at the Show that had come to grief. I hope it wasn't much hurt?"

There was a moment of silence--astonished, inquisitive silence on the part of Miss Fitzroy temporary cessation of the faculty of speech on that of Mr. Gunning. It was the moment, as he reflected afterwards, for a clean, decisive lie, a denial of all ownership; either that, or the instant flinging of Captain Carteret overboard.

Unfortunately for him, he did neither; he lied partially, timorously, and with that clinging to the skirts of the truth that marks the novice.

"Oh, she was all right," he said, his face purpling heavily in the kindly darkness. "What was the polo like, Carteret?"

"But I had no idea that you had bought a horse!" broke in f.a.n.n.y Fitz, in high excitement. "Why didn't you tell Maudie and me? What is it like?"

"Oh, it's--she's just a cob--a grey cob--I just picked her up at the end of the show."

"What sort of a cob? Can she jump? Are you going to ride her with Freddy's hounds?" continued the implacably interested f.a.n.n.y.

"I bought her as--as a trapper, and to do a bit of carting," replied Rupert, beginning suddenly to feel his powers of invention awakening; "she's quite a common brute. She doesn't jump."

"She seems to have jumped pretty well in Na.s.sau Street," remarked Captain Carteret; "as well as I could see in the crowd, she didn't strike me as if she'd take kindly to carting."

"Well, I do think you might have told us about it!" reiterated f.a.n.n.y Fitz. "Men are so ridiculously mysterious about buying or selling horses. I simply named my price and got it. _I_ see nothing to make a mystery about in a deal; do you, Captain Carteret?"

"Well, that depends on whether you are buying or selling," replied Captain Carteret.

But Fate, in the shape of a turning tide and a consequent roll, played for once into the hands of Rupert Gunning. The boat swayed slowly, but deeply, and a waft of steam blew across Miss Fitzroy's face. It was not mere steam; it had been among hot oily things, stealing and giving odour. f.a.n.n.y Fitz was not ill, but she knew that she had her limits, and that conversation, save of the usual rudimentary kind with the stewardess, were best abandoned.

Miss Fitzroy's movements during the next two and a half months need not be particularly recorded. They included--

1. A week in London, during which the sixty pounds, or a great part of it, acquired by the sale of the Connemara mare, pa.s.sed imperceptibly into items, none of which, on a strict survey of expenditure, appeared to exceed three shillings and nine pence.

2. A month at Southsea, with Rupert Gunning's sister, Maudie Spicer, where she again encountered Captain Carteret, and entered aimlessly upon a semi-platonic and wholly unprofitable flirtation with him. During this epoch she wore out the remnant of her summer clothes and laid in subst.i.tutes; rather encouraged than otherwise by the fact that she had long since lost touch with the amount of her balance at the bank.

3. An expiatory and age-long sojourn of three weeks with relatives at an Ess.e.x vicarage, mitigated only by persistent bicycling with her uncle's curate. The result, as might have been predicted by any one acquainted with Miss Fitzroy, was that the curate's affections were diverted from the bourne long appointed for them, namely, the eldest daughter of the house, and that f.a.n.n.y departed in blackest disgrace, with the single consolation of knowing that she would never be asked to the vicarage again.

Finally she returned, third-cla.s.s, to her home in Ireland, with nothing to show for the expedition except a new and very smart habit, and a vague a.s.surance that Captain Carteret would give her a mount now and then with Freddy Alexander's hounds. Captain Carteret was to be on detachment at Enniscar.

PART II

Mr. William Fennessy, lately returned from America, at present publican in Enniscar and proprietor of a small farm on its outskirts, had taken a grey mare to the forge.

It was now November, and the mare had been out at gra.s.s for nearly three months, somewhat to the detriment of her figure, but very much to her general advantage. Even in the south-west of Ireland it is not usual to keep horses out quite so late in the year, but Mr. Fennessy, having begun his varied career as a travelling tinker, was not the man to be bound by convention. He had provided the mare with the society of a donkey and two sheep, and with the shelter of a filthy and ruinous cowshed. Taking into consideration the fact that he had only paid seven pounds ten shillings for her, he thought this accommodation was as much as she was ent.i.tled to.

She was now drooping and dozing in a dark corner of the forge, waiting her turn to be shod, while the broken spring of a car was being patched, as s.h.a.ggy and as dirty a creature as had ever stood there.

"Where did you get that one?" inquired the owner of the car of Mr.

Fennessy, in the course of much lengthy conversation.

"I got her from a cousin of my own that died down in the County Limerick," said Mr. Fennessy in his most agreeable manner. "'Twas himself bred her, and she was near deshtroyed fallin' back on a harra'

with him. It's for postin' I have her."

"She's shlack enough yet," said the carman.

"Ah, wait awhile!" said Mr. Fennessy easily, "in a week's time when I'll have her clipped out, she'll be as clean as amber."

The conversation flowed on to other themes.

It was nearly dark when the carman took his departure, and the smith, a silent youth with sore eyes, caught hold of one of the grey mare's fetlocks and told her to "lift!" He examined each hoof in succession by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle, raked his fire together, and then, turning to Mr. Fennessy, remarked:--

"Ye'd laugh if ye were here the day I put a slipper on this one, an' she afther comin' out o' the thrain--last June it was. 'Twas one Connolly back from Craffroe side was taking her from the station; him that thrained her for Miss Fitzroy. She gave him the two heels in the face."

The glow from the fire illumined the smith's sardonic grin of remembrance. "She had a sandcrack in the near fore that time, and there's the sign of it yet."

The Cinderella-like episode of the slipper had naturally not entered into Mr. Fennessy's calculations, but he took the unforeseen without a change of countenance.

"Well, now," he said deliberately, "I was sayin' to meself on the road a while ago, if there was one this side o' the counthry would know her it'd be yerself."

The smith took the compliment with a blink of his sore eyes.

"Annyone'd be hard set to know her now," he said.

There was a pause, during which a leap of sparks answered each thump of the hammer on the white hot iron, and Mr. Fennessy arranged his course of action.

"Well, Larry," he said, "I'll tell ye now what no one in this counthry knows but meself and Patsey Crimmeen. Sure I know it's as good to tell a thing to the ground as to tell it to yerself!"

He lowered his voice.