“Major Bunbury will tell you all about her,” replied Glasgow, not without interest in the manner in which the information would be received. “I saw him catch her up before she had gone half-a-mile.” “Oh, the wily and dissolute old Bunny,” exclaimed Lady Susan, in high amusement. “Won’t he hear about it from me! I’m simply screaming for a cigarette,” she went on, “and Hughie has my case in his pocket, and he’s miles behind--oh, thanks!” She took one from Glasgow’s case, and lit it in the fresh breeze with practised ease. “I suppose Hughie’s leg must have been bad again to-day,” she said, rather awkwardly, as they moved on again. Glasgow stroked his moustache and looked the other way, with a tact sufficiently ostentatious to impress Lady Susan. “I saw him come out of the covert over a two-foot wall,” Hugh’s wife went on, “and he had no more cling than a toy.” She paused again, and Glasgow still was silent. “You saw him at that fence where I asked him for a lead,” she said, with some genuine hesitation. “What do you think was wrong with him?” “I don’t suppose you can imagine what it feels like to lose your nerve, Lady Susan,” said Glasgow slowly. She took her cigarette out of her mouth. “I’ve been horribly afraid it was that,” she said, in a low voice, and their eyes met in a fellowship in which Hugh could never have a part. CHAPTER VI Taken from an architectural point of view there was nothing to be said for French’s Court. It belonged to the race of stone boxes, with tightly-fitting lids, that were built in Ireland a hundred years ago, the greater box or the less, according to the circumstances of the builder, and it was of as Presbyterian a gauntness as its tribe. Contrary, however, to the rule which ordained that the stone box should, as far as possible, face north and east, French’s Court, with its ranks of high windows, looked out into the sunset across a great plain of western ocean. From the edge of the long bare terrace in front of the house, the grass-lands sloped suavely between plantations to the sea, where Atlantic rollers charged and volleyed in stubborn fastnesses of cliff. The low hills behind the house were clothed with woods, brown and grey now in the mute suspense of January, touched here and there with orange where last year’s beech leaves clung like a stain of rust.