The dying day still flooded the earth with warmth and radiance: the little coffee-and-cream-coloured calves still frisked in the meadows that the buttercups turned into fields of the cloth of gold: the forget-me-nots were still gleaming in the cottage gardens, the lilac was still peeping over manorial walls, the laburnum still hanging down its yellow chandeliers, and the horse-chestnut upholding its white candelabras. But for these twain, obstinately and against the best canine advice going their separate ways, the colour had been sucked out of the landscape and the clemency from the air. Before Will, wandering deviously, had remembered his evening sausages, these also had grown cold; mist and clouds had turned the moon to a blood-red boat, and the bats were swooping and the wood-owls shrilling where larks had soared and sung. CHAPTER VIII CUPID AND CATTLE _Wit she hath without desire_ _To make known how much she hath;_ _And her anger flames no higher_ _Than may fitly sweeten wrath._ _Full of pity as may be,_ _Though perhaps not so to me._ BROWNE, “Britannia’s Pastorals.” I IT is to be feared that the sting of Mr. Will Flynt’s offence lay precisely in Jinny’s ignorance of horses, and that if her old companion had come to her aid more tactfully, she would have welcomed his co-operation in the great purchase. But her pride in her work would hardly allow her to admit even to herself that here was a commission perhaps beyond her capacities. Had she not enjoyed an almost lifelong experience of Methusalem? As a monogamist would resent being told he knew nothing of matrimony, so Jinny repudiated the notion that she knew nothing of equinity. Besides, the cattle-market was far from seeming so strange a world to her as Will had imagined. Had her cart not often conveyed thence or thither a netted calf, had she not marketed even his own mother’s piglings? A fig for the masculine aura! If Mr. Flippance exaggerated after his fashion in declaring she would have undertaken to get him the moon—at any rate it was not the man in it that would have kept her back.