I’ve a great mind to follow them, it can do no harm, and may do some good--’gad I will too. Alice is far too pretty to be gored by a bull; besides, for Arthur’s sake, one is bound to take care of her--luckily, I’ve just finished the cigar, so off we go.” Having arrived at this point in his meditations, Harry rose from his seat, ran lightly down the stairs till he reached a ruined window about six feet from the ground, through which he leaped, then settling into a long swinging trot, he ran, at a pace with which few could have kept up, in the direction taken by Alice and D’Almayne; they had, however, obtained so greatly the start of him, that they had already entered the field occupied by the dangerous bull, ere he had overtaken them. It was a remarkably warm day--the field in which pastured the alarming bull was distant from the abbey ruins half-a-mile at the very least. Now, to jump through a window six feet or thereabouts from the ground, run at the top of one’s speed half-a-mile, leaping recklessly over two gates and a stile in the course of it; and to do all this in a state of anxious excitement on a day when the thermometer stands at 70° in the shade, naturally tends to make a man not only hot, but (if his temper be not semiangelic) cross also. At all events, Harry Coverdale was in the former, if not the latter, condition, when, panting and breathless, he overtook Alice Hazlehurst and Horace D’Almayne, half way across the dangerous field. CHAPTER VI.--JEST AND EARNEST. “Mr. Coverdale, is anything the matter?--why, you are quite out of breath with running!” exclaimed Alice, starting as she beheld him. “Uncomfortably warm, too, I should say,” drawled D’Almayne, glancing significantly at Harry’s glowing cheeks, which were certainly too red to be romantic; “really now, do you consider it judicious to overheat yourself so?--of course, I merely ask as a matter of curiosity.” Harry magnanimously repressed a strong inclination to knock him down; but he felt that to answer him coolly was both literally and metaphorically out of his power, so he confined his reply to Alice’s question. “There is nothing the matter, Miss Hazlehurst,” he said; “but seeing you take this direction, and thinking that Mr. D’Almayne might not be aware a bull was grazing in this meadow, I thought it advisable to follow and put you on your guard, even at the risk of making myself unbecomingly hot;” and as he pronounced the last two words, he looked at D’Almayne as though he wished _he_ had been the bull, and would oblige him by evincing an inclination to attack them. “How very kind and thoughtful of you!” returned Alice, bestowing on him one of her brightest smiles; “but is there any danger?--what had we better do?”