“Thank you!” said Constance, lightly, staying the mare for a moment. “But surely some of the rides will be wanted directly for the pheasants? Anyway I think I shall try the other side of Oxford. They say Bagley is delightful. Good-bye!” She passed through, made a signal to Joseph, and was soon trotting fast towards Oxford. On that return ride, Constance could not conceal from herself that she was unhappy. Her lips quivered, her eyes had much ado to keep back the onset of tears—now that there was no Falloden to see her, or provoke her. How brightly their ride had begun!—how miserably it had ended! She thought of that first exhilaration; the early sun upon the wood; the dewy scents of moss and tree; Falloden’s face of greeting—“How can you look so fresh! You can’t have slept more than four hours—and here you are! Wonderful! ‘Did ever Dian so become a grove’—” An ominous quotation, if she had only remembered at the time where it came from! For really his ways were those of a modern Petruchio—ways that no girl of any decent spirit could endure. Yet how frank and charming had been his talk as they rode into the wood!—talk of his immediate plans, which he seemed to lay at her feet, asking for her sympathy and counsel; of his father and his two sisters; of the Hoopers even. About them, his new tone was no doubt a trifle patronising, but still, quite tolerable. Ewen Hooper, he vowed, was “a magnificent scholar,” and it was too bad that Oxford had found nothing better for him than “a scrubby readership.” But “some day, of course, he’ll have the regius professorship.” Nora was “a plucky little thing—though she hates me!” And he, Falloden, was not so sure after all that Miss Alice would not land her Pryce. “Can’t we bring it about?” And Falloden ran, laughing, through a catalogue of his own smart or powerful relations, speculating what could be done. It was true, wasn’t it, that Pryce was anxious to turn his back on Oxford and the higher mathematics, and to try his luck in journalism, or politics? Well, Falloden happened to know that an attractive post in the Conservative Central Office would soon be vacant; an uncle of his was a very important person on the Council; that and other wires might be pulled. Constance, eagerly, began to count up her own opportunities of the same kind; and between them, they had soon—in imagination—captured the post. Then, said Falloden, it would be for Constance to clinch the matter. No man could do such a thing decently. Pryce would have to be told—”‘The world’s your oyster—but before you open it, you will kindly go and propose to my cousin!—which of course you ought to have done months ago!’” And so laughing and plotting like a couple of children they had gone rambling through the green rides and glades of the wood, occasionally putting their horses to the gallop, that the pulse of life might run still faster.