Fifteen minutes later she was cantering across the heather toward the forest, with the ease of those who have begun this sport of sports as soon as they could stand on their feet, but with far from her usual pleasure. As she reached the first pines standing sentinel-wise at the limit of the _lande_ the sun was just beginning its downward course to the ocean-rim, and she realized with a certain joyless satisfaction that earth and sea would still for many hours be bathed in that rose-gold light, which, save on very few occasions, on hard midsummer or midwinter days, is the veiled glory of Brittany. Nobody at the Castle knew that she had gone out, for she had bidden Ireland, the _piqueux_, to wait for her in the “yard,” where she had mounted “Gavroche,” and now Ireland was following fifty paces behind on “Méssire-Antoine,” the “worst-minded devil at Plenhöel”--as he was distinguished by his present gray-haired rider from a vast company of mettlesome thoroughbreds housed on three rides of the equine “yard,” very much as the hosts of the château were lodged about the _Cour-d’Honneur_. Bending her head beneath the sweeping boughs of the vanguard of trees, Marguerite galloped into a narrow sandy path padded with last year’s pine-needles. She had adopted a pace that suggested flight from some imminent danger, some indeterminate presence that must be avoided at all cost. Her eyes had a fixed, harsh look that certainly had never sojourned there before, and the ungloved hands, tightened on the reins, had a grim expression all their own. “Méssire-Antoine,” fired by the example of “Gavroche,” gave Ireland some trouble to keep him at the regulation distance, so that this worthy began to wonder what ailed his young mistress. He, too, was an ancient servitor, a relic of the late Marquis, who when still a youth had brought him back from a hunting trip in Queen Victoria’s dominions, and ever since then the man had remained at Plenhöel, well satisfied with his lot. It was he, as a matter of fact, who first had put Marguerite on a pony the size of a Newfoundland dog, settled her baby form in the little velvet chair on its back, and gradually taught her how to stick on something less easy. Curbing his evil-tempered mount, he now watched the little figure ahead in the gray linen, close-fitting habit, the thick, fair hair clubbed low on the neck by a flat barret of yellow tortoise-shell, the trim gray sailor-hat tilted forward, and last, but not least, the absurdly small foot with its gleaming golden spur poised in the stirrup, _au ras de la jupe_. He smiled discreetly as he recalled the winning of that golden spur by “le Chevalier Gamin”--as her father had dubbed her from that day on. It was at a boar-hunt, when, out of a large assembly, she alone had arrived at the finish with the Master. She was only fourteen then, and, as it chanced, on sick-leave from her convent; but the spirit of all the past and present Plenhöels, their