"Susan's to lend me Belle. I'm going with you," she said, after a pause in which he had begun to read his paper again. This habit of treating her as if she were not present when he wanted to read or to work, was, she remembered, one of the things she had insisted upon in the beginning of her marriage. "By Jove!" he exclaimed, and the paper dropped from his hands. "I'm jolly glad, but what will you do about the children?" "Mother is coming to look after them. I'll be back in time to hear Harry's lessons, I suppose." "Why, of course; but, look here, you'll be awfully sore. You haven't ridden after the hounds since I knew you. You might even get a fall." "I used to go, though, a great deal--and it won't hurt me to be stiff for a few days. Besides, I want to take up hunting again." Her motive was beyond him--perhaps because of her nearness, which prevented his getting the proper perspective of vision. For all his keenness of insight, he failed utterly to see into the mysterious mind of his wife. He could not penetrate that subtle interplay of traditional virtues and discover that she was in the clutch of one of the oldest and most savage of the passions. "Then you'd better go to bed early and get some sleep," he said. "I suppose we'll have a cup of coffee before starting." "I'll make it on the oil stove while I am dressing. Marthy won't be up then." "Well, I'll come upstairs in ten minutes," he replied, taking up his paper again. "I only want to finish this article." In the morning when she opened the old green shutters and looked out of the window, the horses, having been saddled by candlelight, were standing under the mulberry tree at the gate. Eight years ago, in her girlhood, she would have awakened in a delicious excitement on the morning of a fox-hunt, and have dressed as eagerly as if she were going to a ball; but to-day, while she lit the oil-stove in the hall room and put on the kettle of water, she was supported not by the hope of pleasure, but by a dull, an almost indefinable sensation of dread. The instinct of woman to adjust her personality to the changing ideals of the man she loves--this instinct older than civilization, rooted in tragedy, and existing by right of an unconquerable necessity--rose superior at the moment to that more stable maternal passion with which it has conflicted since the beginning of motherhood. While she put on her riding-habit and tied up the plait of her hair, the one thought in Virginia's mind was that she must be, at all costs, the kind of woman that Oliver wanted.