Elizabeth looked at her husband and said nothing. How unintelligible is human nature, after all! Here, this man, to whom she had been married fifteen years, suddenly developed an intensity, a savagery, that she had no more suspected than she suspected a whirlpool in the placid river that began its course up in the green marshes and made its broad and shallow way to the sea. And it came to her again and again, Suppose it had been not a horse, but a human being that had aroused this vehement desire of possession? It was enough to make her turn pale. “And,” continued Blair, with a smile that had something ferocious in it, “I shall beat Skelton again through a woman. Imagine, he might fall in love with Sylvia Shapleigh, and then find that she had furnished me with the means to be revenged on him! Perhaps Sylvia is in love with him, and that’s why she didn’t want to let me have the horse.” “But he can’t marry, you know, without giving up his wife’s fortune, and that he would be most unlikely to do,” said Elizabeth; and she adroitly got Blair off the subject of Skelton, and Skelton’s plans and his horses, and horses in general, and Alabaster in particular, on to some less exciting topic. CHAPTER VIII. Sylvia went back into the house, troubled in mind, and all that day the thought followed her that she had probably brought about Skelton’s defeat by what she had done. There was no question of a match between Jaybird and Alabaster that autumn; but in the spring--however, much might happen in the meantime, for so Sylvia consoled herself, and heartily wished that Alabaster had never been seen or heard of. There had not been much intercourse between Belfield and Deerchase in the weeks that Skelton had been at home. He had promptly called after the dinner, and it was understood that he intended giving a large ball some time or other, but beyond a few of the gentlemen of the county nobody had been entertained by Skelton at all. Sylvia could not keep her eyes from wandering towards Deerchase, for Skelton was a man who always aroused interest, and then her tender woman’s heart was very soft towards Lewis Pryor.