But she had seen his eyes on Abby a minute before, and had heard his laugh as he answered her. A wave of recklessness broke over her, and she felt that she despised fear with all her Pendleton blood, which loved a fight only less passionately than it loved a sermon. Whatever happened--if she broke her neck--she resolved that she would keep up with Abby! With the drumming of the blood in her ears, an almost savage joy awoke in her. Deep down in her, so deep that it was buried beneath the Virginia Pendleton whom she and her world knew, there stirred faintly the seeds of that ancient lust of cruelty from which have sprung the brutal pleasures of men. The part of her--that small secret part--which was primitive answered to the impulse of jealousy as it did to the rapturous baying of the hounds out of the red and gold distance. A branch grazed her cheek; her hat went as she raced down the high banks of a stream; the thicket of elder tore the ribbon from her head, and loosened her dark flying hair from its braid. In that desolate country, in the midst of the October meadows, with the cries of the hounds rising, like the voice of mortal tragedy, out of the tinted mist on the marshes, the drama of human passions--which is the only drama for the world's stage--was played out to an ending: love, jealousy, envy, desire, desperation, regret-- But when the hunt was over, and she rode home, with a bedraggled brush, which had once been grey, tied to her bridle, all the gorgeous pageantry of the autumnal landscape seemed suddenly asking her: "What is the use?" Her mood had altered, and she felt that her victory was as worthless as the mud-stained fox's brush that swung mockingly back and forth from her bridle. The excitement of the chase had ebbed away, leaving only the lifeless satisfaction of the reward. She had neglected her children, she had risked her life--and all for the sake of wresting a bit of dead fur out of Abby's grasp. A spirit which was not her spirit, which was so old that she no longer recognized that it had any part in her, which was yet so young that it burned in her heart with the unquenchable flame of youth--this spirit, which was at the same time herself and not herself, had driven her, as helpless as a fallen leaf, in a chase that she despised, towards a triumph that was worthless. "By Jove, you rode superbly, Virginia! I had no idea you could do it," said Oliver, as they trotted into Dinwiddie. She smiled back at him, and her smile was tired, dust-stained, enigmatical. "No, you did not know that I could do it," she answered. "You'll keep it up now, won't you?" he asked pleadingly.