Sometimes one line passes the other, and then sustains a momentary check, while the other darts forward; and now and then a panel is smashed, with the usual altercation, and dust unspeakable eddying and floating everywhere in the sun; all sorts of chaff exchanged, mail-coach horns blowing, and general impudence and hilarity; gentlemen with veils on, and ladies with light hoods over their bonnets, and all sorts of gauzy defences against the dust. The utter novelty of all these sights and sounds highly amuses Alice, to whom they are absolutely strange. "I am so amused," she said, "at the gravity you all seem to take these wonderful doings with. I could not have fancied anything like it. Isn't that Borrowdale?" "So it is," said Lady May. "I thought he was in France. He doesn't see us, I think." He did see them, but it was just as he was cracking a personal joke with a busman, in which the latter had decidedly the best of it, and he did not care to recognise his lady acquaintances at disadvantage. "What a fright that man is!" said Lord Wynderbroke. "But his team is the prettiest in England, except Longcluse's," said Darnley; "and, by Jove, there's Longcluse's drag!" "Those are very nice horses," said Lord Wynderbroke looking at Longcluse's team, as if he had not heard Darnley's observation. "They are worth looking at, Miss Arden." Longcluse was seated on the box, with a veil on, through which his white smile was indistinctly visible. "And what a fright _he_ is, also! He looks like a picture of Death I once saw, with a cloth half over his face; or the Veiled Prophet. By Jove, a curious thing that the two most hideous men in England should have between them the two prettiest teams on earth!" Lord Wynderbroke looks at Darnley with raised brows, vaguely. He has been talking more than his lordship perhaps thinks he has any business to talk, especially to Alice. "You will be more diverted still when we have got upon the course," interposes Lord Wynderbroke. "The variety of strange people there--gipsies, you know, and all that--mountebanks, and thimble-riggers, and beggars, and musicians--you'll wonder how such hordes could be collected in all England, or where they come from." "And although they make something of a day like this, how on earth they contrive to exist all the other days of the year, when people are sober, and minding their own business," added Darnley. "To me the pleasantest thing about the drive is our finding ourselves in the open country. Look out of the window there--trees and farm-steads--it is so rural, and such an odd change!" said Lady May. "And the young corn, I'm glad to see, is looking very well," said Lord Wynderbroke, who claimed to be something of an agriculturist. "And the oddest thing about it is our being surrounded, in the midst of all this rural simplicity, with the population of London," threw in Vivian Darnley. "Remember, Miss Arden, our wager," said Lord Wynderbroke; "you have backed May Queen."