The cheque was written on a Thursday, and in the afternoon Captain Standish appeared among the commercial aristocracy who now recognised Mrs. Piper’s Thursday afternoons as a pleasant way of wasting a couple of hours, airing their self-importance, and exercising their carriage horses. ‘Has Piper consented to your hunting this season?’ asked the captain, eagerly. He was just so much in love as to feel that the hunting-field would be an arid waste without Bella. ‘He has consented to my riding, and he has given me a hundred pounds to buy a horse. Here is the cheque, and if you really don’t mind the trouble of choosing one----’ ‘You shall have the handsomest horse in Yorkshire,’ said the captain, putting the cheque in his waistcoat pocket. ‘But a hundred pounds won’t be enough for that, will it?’ asked Bella. ‘One hears of such extravagant prices being given for horses now-a-days.’ ‘It will be quite enough, as I shall manage.’ ‘Ah, you are so clever about horse-flesh. Our coachman says the horses you ride are something wonderful.’ ‘I don’t ride screws,’ said the captain, with a well-satisfied air. He had a lofty pity for the poor creatures who had to ride anything they could get, and be thankful, and to dress themselves respectably upon something under that eight hundred a year which Brummel declared to be the lowest amount upon which a gentleman could clothe himself. Early in the next week Bella received a little note from the captain, written at one of his London clubs. ‘Dear and liege lady,’-- ‘I have bought you a perfect hunter, the gem of Sir Lionel Hawtree’s stud, sold at Tattersall’s this afternoon. I shall bring him to you on Thursday morning. Be ready for a preliminary canter in the park. He is young, and full of playfulness, but without an atom of vice. He is quite the handsomest thing you ever saw--black as my hat, and with the sinews of a gladiator, as light as an antelope, and as strong as a lion. I long to see you mounted on him. ‘Yours always, ‘STEPHEN STANDISH.’