How long he had slept he knew not, when he was roused by a man’s step in the entrance-hall near him, and by a voice which in the first bewilderment of waking he failed to recognise as that of Jack Winthrop, the owner of the wicked chestnut, and a distant neighbour, whose visits, few and far between, were usually paid on that _dies non_ to a business man, a Sunday afternoon. “Hallo, old fellow! taking a snooze, eh?” was Jack’s jovial greeting; and then the two men shook hands, while Mrs. Beacham, adjusting her spectacles, and with rather a scared look in her sharp old eyes, endeavoured, under the appearance of being still more wideawake than usual, to hide the fact that she had been asleep. Jack was not much--as he often remarked himself--of a ladies’ man. He was far more at home in the stable than the drawing-room. Nevertheless, and especially when he had on his go-to-meeting coat and hat, he could shuffle through the usual forms of social good breeding with tolerable success. Of these forms, a short dissertation on the weather, past, present, and to come, together with a few polite inquiries regarding the health and whereabouts of the members of their respective families, stood first in importance. It was to the last of these conversational duties that Mrs. Beacham was indebted for some valuable information regarding the proceedings of the erratic young woman whose continued absence was to the old lady a perpetual source of mingled anger and satisfaction. “Well, and how do you get along without the missus; eh, John?” asked the visitor. And then, with a rather meaning wink and a jerk of his smoothly-brushed yellow head, “I expect I’ve seen Mrs. John since you have; caught sight of her yesterday morning as I was tooling through the Park. She was a-horseback, looking like paint,--so she was, with such a colour,--and the young Squire along with her. There was a servant behind ’em on a screwed bay horse; and I didn’t think much of the one the missus rode either--a leggy brute! She wouldn’t think much of him, I fancy, after Lady Meg. But you’ll have her--the missus, I mean--back again soon, I doubt.” And the worthy, stupid fellow--stupid, that is, in everything but what regarded horse-flesh--pulled up at last, entirely unconscious that he had applied the match to a train, and that a “blowing-up” of some kind or other would be the inevitable consequence of his thoughtlessly-spoken words.