“The black suits you down to the ground,” shouted Sir Henry, in the middle of a run, as he bucketed past his friend upon a pulling chestnut that had no respect for anybody, but clove his way through the ruck of riders like a battering-ram. Sir Henry boasted of this animal that he never kicked a hound. “Small thanks to him,” said the Master, “for he kicks everything else. Hounds are not good enough for him. He nearly smashed my leg last Monday.” Harrington and Juliet did a good deal of quiet flirtation while the hounds were drawing a spinney rather late in the day, after a very good run and a kill. He told her all about the change in his position, and that he was to be his father’s partner after a very short apprenticeship to the law. “And you will live in Dorchester all your life,” said Juliet, with an involuntary disgust. “Not if I can help it. I don’t mean to vegetate in a dead-alive provincial town. My father has a London connection already, and all his business wants is a little new blood. I hope to start chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields before I am many years older. And if I should marry,” he continued, faltering a little, “I could afford to have a house in the West End—May Fair or Belgravia, for instance.” “Let it be May Fair, I beg—for your wife’s sake, whoever she may be,” exclaimed Juliet lightly. “A small house in Belgravia is an abomination. There is an atmosphere of invincible dreariness throughout that district which can only be redeemed by wealth and splendour. Perhaps it is because the place is on a level with Millbank. There is a flavour of the prison in the very air. Now, in Curzon or Hertford Street one breathes the air of the Park and Piccadilly, and one could exist in a bandbox. But really now, Harrington, joking apart, is it not rather wild in a young man like you—not out of paternal leading-strings—to talk about marriage and housekeeping?” “One can’t help thinking of the future. Besides, I am not so very young. I am four and twenty.” Juliet laughed a short cynical laugh, which ended in a sigh. She wondered whether he knew that she was three years older. Brothers are such traitors. “I am four and twenty, and I feel that it is in me to succeed,” concluded Harrington, with a comfortable vanity which he mistook for the self-confidence of genius. The hounds drew blank, and the riders jogged homewards presently, by lane and common, Sir Henry keeping in front with one of his particular friends, and talking horse-flesh all the way, while Juliet and Harrington followed slowly side by side in earnest conversation.