A discarded racer was scarcely the best mount for pottering about after the cubs; but the pursuit of pleasure, that was always a synonym for excitement, had made Vera a fine horsewoman, and she loved the surprises that a light-hearted four-year-old can give his rider; and when the last cub had been slaughtered, to gratify Mr. Somebody's hounds, Claude and Vera had to ride to please their horses, and there was a spice of danger in the tearing gallop across great stretches of pasture, where the green sward sloped upward or downward to the crumbling edge of the red cliffs, and where they saw the wide, blue floor of the sea, and the dim outline of the Welsh coast. One morning, when they were riding shoulder to shoulder, at a wilder pace than usual, and when Vera's horse was doing his best to get absolute possession of his bridle, she turned with a light laugh to her husband. "Isn't this delicious?" she asked breathlessly, thrilled by the freshness of the air and the rapture of the pace. "Would you mind if we were not able to stop them on this side of the sea?" "Would I mind?" he echoed, looking at her with his careless smile, the smile in which there was often a touch of mockery. "Not I, my love. It wouldn't be half a bad end, to finish one's last ride in a headlong plunge over the cliff--to know none of the gruesome details of dissolution--nothing but a sense of being hurled through bright air, forty fathoms deep into bright water. All the same, I don't mean these brutes to have their own way," he concluded in his most matter-of-fact tone, with his hand upon Ganymede's bridle. They turned their horses, and trotted quietly home, Vera pale and somewhat shaken by the excitement of the long gallop. They were near the end of their country holiday, and they were to part at the end of the week, Claude to spend a fortnight at Newmarket, Vera to start alone for Italy, stopping here and there for a few days, on her way to her Roman villa, where Claude was to join her, bringing his hunters with him, not these light thoroughbreds, but horses of coarser quality and more experience, fitter for the rough work of the Campagna. It had been Vera's own fancy to revisit familiar places in Italy. Claude had been urgent with her to abandon the idea, but she would not listen to him. "I want to see San Marco, where I lived so long with Grannie; when we were poor and shabby--such a humdrum life. I sometimes wonder how I could bear it?"