an interest in your husband, what will you take an interest in? It's natural—not to say primitive. Do you know, he says I'm the most primitive person he ever came across. Should you say I was primitive? Don't answer that. I don't think he'd like me to talk about him quite so much. He thinks I never know where to draw the line. But I never see any lines to draw, and if I did, I wouldn't know how to draw them."

Stanistreet smiled grimly. He was wondering whether she was "primitive."

"Just look at Scarum's ears! Don't tease her. She doesn't like it. Dear thing! She's delicious to kiss—she's got such a soft nose. But she'll bolt as soon as look at you, and she's awfully hard to hold." Her fingers were twitching with the desire to hold Scarum.

"I think I can manage her."

"You see, somehow or the other I like talking to you. You may be a sinner, but I don't think you are a fool; and I've a sort of a notion that you understand."

He was silent. So many women had thought he understood.

"I wonder—do you understand!"

The eyes that Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on Stanistreet were not search-lights; they were wells of darkness, unsearchable, unfathomable.

Something in Stanistreet, equally inscrutable, something that was himself and not himself, answered very low to that vague appeal.

"Yes, I understand."

He had turned towards her, smiling darkly, and all her face flashed back a happy smile.

Surely, oh surely, Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the soul of indiscretion; for at that moment Miss Batchelor, trotting past with Lady Morley, looked from them to her companion and smiled too.

That smile was the first stone.

Miss Batchelor acknowledged them with a curt little nod, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson's face became instantly overclouded. Louis leaned a little nearer and said in a husky, uneven voice, "Surely you don't mind that impertinent woman?"

"Not a bit," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson. "She's got a villainous seat."

"Then what are you thinking about?"

"I'm thinking what horrid hard lines it is that they won't let me hunt. All the time I might have been flying across country with Nevill, instead of—"

"Instead of crawling in a dog-cart with me. Thank you, Mrs. Nevill."

"You needn't thank me. I haven't given you anything."

Again Stanistreet wondered whether Mrs. Nevill was very simple or very profound. And wondering, he gave the mare a cut across the flanks that made her leap in the shafts.

"That was silly of you. She'll have her heels through before you know where you are. She's a demon to kick, is Scarum."

Scarum had spared the splash-board this time, but she was going furiously, and the little dog-cart rocked from side to side. Mrs. Nevill Tyson rose to her feet.

"Strikes me you can't drive a little bit," said she.

"Please sit down, Mrs. Tyson." But Mrs. Tyson remained imperiously standing, trying to keep her balance like a small sailor in a rollicking sea.

"Get up."

Stanistreet muttered wrathfully under his mustache, and she caught the words "damned foolery."

"Bundle out this minute." She made a grab at the rail in an undignified manner.

He doubled the reins firmly over his right hand, and with his left arm he forced her back into her seat. He was holding her there when Farmer Ashby turned out of a by-lane and followed close behind them. And Farmer Ashby had a nice tale to tell at "The Cross-Roads" of how he had seen the Captain driving with his arm round Mrs. Tyson's waist.

That was another stone.

Stanistreet tugged at the reins with both hands and pulled the mare almost on to her haunches; her hoofs shrieked on the iron road; she stood still and snorted, her forelegs well out, her hide smoking.

When he had made quite sure that the animal's attitude was that of temporary exhaustion rather than of passion, Stanistreet changed seats, and gave the reins to Mrs. Nevill Tyson; and Scarum burst into her second heat.

"I suppose you have a right to drive your own animal into the ditch," said he.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her teeth with a determined air, planted her feet firmly on the floor of the trap to give herself a good purchase; she gave the reins a little twist as she had seen Stanistreet do, she balanced the whip like a fishing-rod, with the line dangling over Scarum's ears, and then she rattled away over the wrinkling roads at a glorious pace; she reeled over cart-ruts, she went thump over sods and bump over mud-heaps, she grazed walls and hedges, skimmed over the brink of ditches, careened round corners, and tore past most things on the wrong side; and Stanistreet's sense of deadly peril was lost in the pleasure of seeing her do it. When she was not chattering to him she was encouraging Scarum with all sorts of endearments, small chirping sounds and delicate chuckles, smiling that indefinably malicious, lop-sided smile which Stanistreet had been taught all his life to interpret as a challenge. Now they were going down a lane of beeches, they bent their heads under the branches, and a shower of rime fell about her shoulders, powdering her black hair; he watched it thawing in the warmth there till it sparkled like a fine dew; and now they were running between low hedges, and the keen air from the frosted fields smote the blood into her cheeks and the liquid light into her eyes; it lifted the fringe from her forehead and crisped it over the fur border of her hat; flying ends of lace and sable were flung behind her like streamers; she seemed to be winged with the wind of speed; she was the embodiment of vivid, reckless, beautiful life.

It came over him with a sort of shock that this woman was Tyson's wife, irrevocably, until one or other of them died. And Tyson was not the sort of man to die for anybody's convenience but his own.

At last they swayed into the courtyard at Thorneytoft. "Thank heaven we're alive!" he said, as he followed her into the house.

Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on the threshold. "Do you mean to say you didn't enjoy it!"

"Oh, of course it was delightful; but I don't know that it was exactly—safe."

"I see—you were afraid. We were safe enough so long as I was driving."

He smiled drearily. He felt that he had been whirled along in a delirious dream—a madman driven by a fool. As if in answer to his thoughts, she called back over the banisters—

"I'm not such a fool as I look, you know."

No, for the life of him Stanistreet did not know. His doubt was absurd, for it implied that Mrs. Nevill Tyson practiced the art of symbolism, and he could hardly suppose her to be so well acquainted with the resources of language. On the other hand, he could not conceive how, after living more than half a year with Tyson, she had preserved her formidable naïveté.

At dinner that evening she still further obscured the question by boasting that she had saved Captain Stanistreet's life. Stanistreet protested.

"Nonsense," said she; "you know perfectly well that you'd have upset the whole show if you'd been left to yourself."

Tyson stared at his wife. "Do you mean to say that he let you drive?"

"Let me? Not he! He couldn't help it." Her white throat shook with derisive laughter. "I took the reins; or, if you like, I kicked over the traces. I always told you I'd do it some day."

Tyson pushed his chair back from the table and scowled meditatively. Mrs. Nevill Tyson was smiling softly to herself as she played with the water in her finger-glass. Presently she rose and shook the drops from her fingertips, like one washing her hands of a light matter. Stanistreet got up and opened the door for her, standing very straight and militant and grim; and as she passed through she looked back at him and laughed again.

"I can see," said Tyson, as Stanistreet took his seat again, "you've been letting that wife of mine make more or less of a fool of herself. If you had no consideration for her neck or your own, you might have thought of my