The field where the sports took place lay about a mile out of the village. Mrs. Carroll and some other ladies were dispensing refreshments to all comers, and afterwards the prizes would be given out. I went up to Derryaghy to call for Katherine and Gerald, to go with them, but found they were going to ride over, and were all ready to start when I arrived. It was the first time I had seen Katherine on horseback, and she looked to me more beautiful than ever. In her dark-blue riding-habit, with her sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks, her radiant youth and health, she made me think of the girl in the equestrian portrait by Millais and Landseer, a coloured reproduction of which I had cut out of a Christmas number and tacked up on the wall in my bedroom. And straightway I saw in myself the page-boy who stands by the gateway in that picture, his eyes fixed in rapt admiration upon his mistress. They rode away, an amazingly handsome pair, telling me they would see me later up at the field, and to this I answered, “Yes.” Mrs. Carroll and Miss Dick had already gone on in the carriage, so I was left quite alone. I decided immediately that I wouldn’t go to the sports: if they chose to leave me like this I wasn’t going to run after them. I mooned about, building a romance on the equestrian portrait _motif_. I imagined myself as dying; some accident had happened to me, and suddenly Katherine rode up and springing down from her horse threw her arms round me, kneeling in the blood and dust of the road. She kissed me passionately, careless of all the people who watched her, repeating again and again, “I love you――I love you――I love you.” I gloated over this imaginary scene till I had squeezed the last drop of colour out of it, and it ceased, by dint of much repetition, to thrill me even faintly: then I went into the house and nosed about for a book. A dozen had just come down from the library in town, and, with a couple of volumes of “Two on a Tower” under my arm, I made my way to the shore.