When Mr. Lawrence had left, Kitty changed her shooting dress for a habit and announced to Miss Abingdon, who suggested that she should rest for the remainder of the afternoon, that she was going to exercise one of Jane's horses. She mounted the hunter and went off alone, blowing kisses to Miss Abingdon from the tips of her riding gloves, and so out of the white gates down the road to the left, and then into the open country. She set her horse at a fence and flew over it. Her small white teeth were pressed together, and her eyes, under level black eye-brows, had a fierce look in them. She pulled her hat more firmly down upon her brows and steered her hunter across country, as though following the quickest burst of hounds of the season. Kitty was a tireless rider, and Jane's hunter did not want exercise for some little time after this. The country round Bowshott is known as 'stiff' for hunting people, but Kitty had marked out a straight line for herself, and took everything that came in her way with a sort of foolhardiness which made a trifle of big hedges or yawning ditches, and all the time she was saying to herself, 'I will never forgive him, never!' She had given her whole heart to Nigel Christopherson, and believed that he had given his to her. And now he was at Hulworth with Mrs. Avory, and Mr. Lawrence was touring the country in his big red motor-car telling everybody about it. Mrs. Wrottesley heard the story from her maid, who had it from Miss Abingdon's butler, and she told it to her mistress when they were counting charity blankets together in Mrs. Wrottesley's bedroom. The canon was away from home, and Mrs. Wrottesley was having a few uninterrupted days in which to do her work, without calls upon her to come and admire Canon Wrottesley. The story was received very quietly by her. She sat a full minute without saying anything at all, and then she finished counting the blankets. When that useful task was over Mrs. Wrottesley began to speak. This was a much more unusual event with her than with most people, and what made it more forcible was that she began to speak deliberately and with intention. 'I am going to stay at Hulworth,' said Mrs. Wrottesley. 'Pack my box, please, and order the carriage to be round in half an hour.' She drove over to Hulworth, her plain and rather austere face showing very little expression upon it, and she reached the big ugly house to find Toffy sitting over a smouldering fire in the drawing-room, his hair rumpled up from his forehead and his head buried in his hands, and Mrs. Avory upstairs still suffering from slight concussion of the brain. There are times when the strong arm of a man is the one needful and the one serviceable thing in the world; but there are times again when it is only a strong woman who is wanted, or who is capable of a certain sort of work.