Such regrets were neither hysterical nor unusual. She knew that there was some great void in her life, some desire ungratified, which must haunt her to the end; and this knowledge drove her day by day along those paths of solitude which her father wished her to tread, though never would he have confessed as much. His lavish gifts to her scarcely won a word of thanks. When she rode a horse, it was madly, defying convention, helter-skelter across the grass lands like a Mexican flying over the prairie. She bathed in the deepest, most dangerous pools; went shooting but shot little, because her will revolted from the purposes of slaughter; would picnic in the darkest thickets and had even set up a tent and slept in it, far from house or cottage, at the height of the summer glory. "A little madcap," the bland vicar said when he heard of it, "a regular brick of a girl, though who'd believe it when he saw her at her father's dinner table. Why, last night, sir, she sat in the drawing-room just for all the world a paragon of propriety with ten generations of grand dames to her name. I didn't dare to take a second glass of port for fear I should be jocular. And to-day I saw her flying toward Derby in the new car at thirty miles an hour. Away went my straw hat just like a cricket ball. Now, what are you to make of a young lady like that?" Doctor Philips, the person addressed upon this occasion, confessed that you might make many things of her. "She could earn a good living at steeplechasing, and I would pay her five pounds a week to be my _chauffeur_," he said quite seriously, "and please don't forget the ball she drives at golf. Why, vicar, she'd give the pair of us a half. It's no ordinary woman could do that." They agreed that it could not be, and having discussed the Lady Evelyn at great length were about to sit down to lunch together, individuals aware of their own humility in the face of a superior intellect, when Williams, the groom, came flying over from the Hall and demanded to see the Doctor instantly. "There's bin a haccident on the road, sir," he cried breathlessly, "please come over at once--the gentleman's up at the house and the Earl away." The doctor, wasting no words, set out with a sigh and a backward glance at the inviting table. The Vicar said: "Thank God--I thought that _she_ had come to grief." CHAPTER XI A RACE FOR LIFE