Cris was walking off in the direction of the stable, carefully leading his horse. "What are you going to do with him?" asked Rupert. "To leave him in the stable?" "Until I can get home and send the groom for him. _I'm_ not going to cool my heels, dragging him home," retorted Cris. Rupert retired indoors, and sat down on the high stool. He still had some accounts to make up. They had to be done that evening; and as Ford did not come in to do them, he must. Had Ford been there, Rupert would have left him to do it, and gone home at once. "I wonder how many years of my life I am to wear out in this lively place?" thought Rupert, after five minutes of uninterrupted attention given to his work, which slightly progressed in consequence. "It's a shame that I should be put to it. A paid fellow at ten shillings a week would do it better than I. If Chattaway had a spark of good feeling in him, he'd put me into a farm. It would be better for me altogether, and more fitting for a Trevlyn. Catch him at it! He wouldn't let me be my own master for----" A sound as of a horse trotting off interrupted Rupert's cogitations. He came down from his stool. A thought crossed him that George Ryle's horse might have got loose, and be speeding home riderless, at his own will and pleasure. It was George Ryle's horse, but not riderless. To Rupert's intense astonishment, he saw Mr. Cris mounted on him, and leisurely riding away. "Halloa!" called Rupert, speeding after the horse and his rider. "What are you going to do with that horse, Cris?" Cris turned his head, but did not stop. "I'm going to ride him home. His having been left here just happens right for me." "You get off," shouted Rupert. "The horse was lent to me, not to you. Do you hear, Cris?" Cris heard, but did not stop: he was urging the horse on. "_You_ don't want him," he roughly said. "You can walk, as you always do." Further remonstrance, further following, was useless. Rupert's words were drowned in the echoes of the horse's hoofs, galloping away in the distance. Rupert stood, white with anger, impotent to stop him, his hands stretched out on the empty air, as if their action could arrest the horse and bring him back again. Certainly the mortification was bitter; the circumstance precisely one of those likely to affect an excitable nature; and Rupert was on the point of going into that dangerous fit known as the Trevlyn passion, when its course was turned aside by a hand laid upon his shoulder. He turned, it may almost be said, savagely. Ford was standing there out of breath, his good-humoured face red with the exertion of running. "I say, Mr. Rupert, you'll do a fellow a service, won't you? I have had a message that my mother's taken suddenly ill; a fit, they say, of some sort. Will you finish what there is to do here, and lock up for once, so that I can go home directly?"