"That is Mr. Langton's way of talking," she said; "and you are using it to hide your feelings. Will you tell me her name?--her Christian name only?" "She was called Margaret--Margaret Dance. There is no reason why you should not have it in full." "Is there a portrait of her?" "Yes; as a girl she sat to Kneller--a Dryad leaning against an oak. The picture hangs in my dressing-room." "It should have hung, rather, in Dicky's nursery; which," she added, picking up and using the weapon she most disliked, "need not have debarred your seeing it from time to time." He glanced up, for he had never before heard her speak thus sharply. "Perhaps you are right," he agreed; "though, for me, I let the dead bury the dead. I have no belief, remember, in any life beyond this one. Margaret is gone, and I see not how, being dead, she can advantage me or Dicky." His words angered Ruth and at the same time subtly pleased her; and on second thoughts angered her the more for having pleased. She thought scorn of herself for her momentary jealousy of the dead; scorn for having felt relief at his careless tone; and some scorn to be soothed by a doctrine that, in her heart, she knew to be false. For the moment her passions were like clouds in thunder weather, mounting against the wind; and in the small tumult of them she let jealousy dart its last lightning tongue. "I am not learned in these matters, my lord. But I have heard that man must make a deity of something. The worse sort of unbeliever, they say, lives in the present and burns incense to himself. The better sort, having no future to believe in, idolises his past." "Margaret is dead," he repeated. "I am no sentimentalist." She bent her head. To herself she whispered. "He may not idolise his past, yet he cannot escape from it." . . . And her thoughts might have travelled farther, but she had put the mare to a walk again and just then her ears caught an unaccustomed sound, or confusion of sounds. At the end of the alley she reined up, wide-eyed. A narrow gateway here gave access to what had yesterday been a sloping paddock where Miss Quiney grazed a couple of cows. To-day the cows had vanished and given way to a small army of labourers. Broad strips of turf had vanished also and the brown loam was moving downhill in scores of wheel-barrows, to build up the slope to a level. Sir Oliver marked her amazement and answered it with an easy laugh. "The time is short, you see, and already we have wasted half an hour of it unprofitably. . . . These fellows appear to be working well." She gazed at the moving gangs as one who, having come by surprise upon a hive of bees, stands still and cons the small creatures at work. "But what is the meaning of it?" "The meaning? Why, that for this week I am your riding-master, and that by to-morrow you will have a passable riding-school." Chapter IX. THE PROSPECT.