I was deep in my speculations, when suddenly a horse bounded past me by a cross path. I had barely time to see the flutter of a habit, when it was lost to view. I waited to see her groom follow, but he did not appear. I listened, but no sound of a horse could be heard approaching. Had her horse run away? Had her servant lost trace of her? were questions that immediately occurred to me; but there was nothing to suggest the answer or dispel the doubt I could bear my anxiety no longer, and away I dashed after her. It was not till after a quarter of an hour that I came in sight of her, and then she was skimming along over the even turf at a very slapping pace, which, however, I quickly perceived was no run-away gallop. [Illustration: 104] This fact proclaimed itself in a most unmistakable manner, for she suddenly drew up, and wheeled about, pointing at the same time to the ground, where her whip had just fallen. I dashed up and dismounted, when, in a voice tremulous with agitation, and with a face suffused in blushes, she begged my pardon for her gesture; she believed it was her groom who was following her, and had never noticed his absence before. I cannot repeat her words, but in accent, manner, tone, and utterance, I never heard the like of them before. What would I have given at that moment, George, for your glib facility of French! Hang me if I would not have paid down a thousand pounds to have been able to rattle out even some of those trashy commonplaces I have seen you scatter with such effect in the _coulisses_ of the opera! It was all of no avail. "Where there 's a will there 's a way," says the adage; but it's a sorry maxim where a foreign language is concerned. All the volition in the world won't supply irregular verbs; and the most go-ahead resolution will never help one to genders. I did, of course, mutter all that I could think of; and, default of elocution, I made my eyes do duty for my tongue, and with tolerable success too, as her blush betrayed. I derived one advantage, too, from my imperfect French, which is worth recording,--I was perfectly obdurate as to anything she might have replied in opposition to my wishes, and notwithstanding all her scruples to the contrary, persisted in accompanying her back to the town.