Winter drew out to spring; to the confabulations between Jimmy Monkley and Henry Scarlett were now added absences from the house that lasted for a day or two at a time. These expeditions always began with the friends' dressing up in pearl-buttoned overcoats very much cut in at the waist. Sylvia felt that such careful attention to externals augured the great secrecy and importance of the enterprise; remembering the effect of Willie Threadgould's duster-shrouded countenance upon his fellow-conspirators, she postulated to herself that with the human race, particularly the male portion, dress was always the prelude to action. One morning after breakfast, when Monkley and her father had hurried off to catch a train, the baron said in his mincing voice: "Off ra-c-cing again! They do enjoy themselves-s-s." She asked what racing meant, and the baron replied: "Hors-s-se-ra-c-cing, of cour-se." Sylvia, being determined to arrive at the truth of this business, put the baron through a long interrogation, from which she managed to learn that the jockeys wore colored silk jackets and that in his prosperous days the baron had found the sport too exciting for his heart. After breakfast Sylvia took the subject with her into the kitchen, and tried to obtain fuller information from Clara, who, with the prospect of a long morning's work, was disinclined to be communicative. "What a boy you are for asking questions! Why don't you ask your dad when he comes home, or that Monkley? As if I'd got time to talk about racing. I've got enough racing of my own to think about; but if it goes on much longer I shall race off out of it one of these days, and that's a fact. You may take a pitcher to the well, but you can't make it drink, as they say." Sylvia withdrew for a while, but later in the afternoon she approached Clara again. "God bless the boy! He's got racing on the brain," the maid exclaimed. "I had a young man like that once, but I soon gave him the go-by. He was that stuffed up with halfpenny papers he couldn't cuddle any one without crackling like an egg-shell. 'Don't carry on so, Clara,' he said to me. 'I had a winner to-day in the three-thirty.' 'Did you?' I answered, very cool. 'Well, you've got a loser now,' and with that I walked off very dignified and left him. It's the last straw, they say, that gives the camel the hump. And he properly gave me the hump. But I reckon, I do, that it's mugs like him as keeps your dad and that Monkley so smart-looking. I reckon most of the racing they do is racing to see which can get some silly josser to give them his money first." Sylvia informed Clara that her father used to play cards for money in France. "There you are. What did I tell you?" Clara went on. "Nap, they call it, but I reckon that there Monkley keeps wide enough awake. Oh, he's an artful one, he is! Birds and feathers keep together, they say, and I reckon your dad's cleverer than what he makes out to be."