She seemed to herself to be calling out of a dream; yet she had never felt so strongly and defiantly alive. The thud of galloping hoofs was in her ears, and she looked back in time to see Glasgow’s horse clear the stones with a long bound, and receive a blow across the nose from Tom Quin’s stick as he landed. Drag as she might she could not calm Isabella, who was bucketing through the heather tussocks with school-girl ardour; when she looked again, Quin was holding his hand to his face, as if he had been struck upon it, and was raving in that inarticulate futility of rage that is not good to see. Glasgow came on like a thunderbolt, and was beside Slaney in a moment, his horse still rampant from the blow. “He’s mad!” she called out through the wind that sang in her teeth. “He didn’t know what he was doing.” “Didn’t he, though!” Glasgow shouted back, his eyes tracking the hounds where they were flitting like white birds across a green field near the brow of the hill; “he knows now, I think!” Lady Susan was a hundred yards ahead. Glasgow let his horse go, reducing the distance at every stride, and leaving Slaney behind. He did not seem like the lover who had found out the secret of her lips two evenings ago. Other riders were close to her now, converging from different points; she was dimly aware of Major Bunbury below her on the left, riding hard and steady to pick up a bad start; she saw Danny’s red coat far away in the heather; she vaguely missed Hugh’s. She was in the green field at last, with the hounds casting themselves at the farther side of an ugly stone-faced bank plumed with furze-bushes. The grey had refused, with the nervousness of youth and inexperience, and Glasgow was looking about for a better place to get over. At the same moment Slaney saw Hugh galloping towards them up a hillside track on the bay that his wife had ridden the Friday before, and through the maddening din of the hounds opening again on the line, she heard Lady Susan call to him to give them a lead. “There, Hughie!” she cried, “between the two furze-bushes is the only chance. That horse will do it flying.” Hugh cantered to the place, the bay horse pulling and fuming; he looked at the steep face of the bank, the deep ditch in front of it, and knew that to save his soul he could not ride at it. “It’s not good enough,” he called out, turning his horse. “We must try round some other way.” “Try round!” ejaculated Lady Susan, rushing the grey at the fence. “Look at the hounds running like the devil over the top of the hill! Come up, horse!”