Mrs. Nevill Tyson made no answer. She was trying to think, and thinking came hard to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.
"I suppose he's had a past. But of course it doesn't do to go poking and probing into a man's past—"
Stanistreet lifted his eyebrows and looked at the little woman. She was sitting bolt upright, staring out over the vague fields; she seemed to have uttered the words unconsciously, as if at the dictation of some familiar spirit. "And yet I wish—no, I don't wish I knew. I know he must have had an awful time of it." She turned her face suddenly on Stanistreet. "What do you think he told me the other day? He said he had never known anybody who wasn't either a fool or a sinner. What do you think of that? Must you be one or the other?"
Stanistreet shrugged his shoulders. "You may be both. We are all of us sinners, and certainly a great many of us are fools."
"I wonder. He isn't a fool."
Stanistreet wondered too. He wondered at the things she allowed herself to say; he wondered whether she was drawing any inference; and above all, he wondered at the shrinking introspective look on her careless face.
In another minute Mrs. Nevill Tyson had started from her seat and was waving her muff wildly in the air. "Look—there he goes! Oh, did you see him take that fence? What an insane thing to do with the ground like that."
He looked in the direction indicated by the muff, and saw Tyson riding far ahead of the hunt, a small scarlet blot on the gray-white landscape.
"By Jove! he rides as if he were charging the enemy's guns at the head of a line of cavalry."
"Yes." She leaned back; the excitement faded from her face, and she sighed. The sigh was so light that it scarcely troubled the frosty air, but it made Stanistreet look at her again. How adorably pretty she was in all her moods!
Perhaps she was conscious of the look, for she rattled on again more incoherently than before. "I'm talking a great deal of nonsense; I always do when I get the chance. You can't talk nonsense to mother; she wouldn't understand it. She'd think it was sense. And, you see, I'm interested in my husband. I suppose it's the proper thing to take an interest in your husband. If you won't take an interest in your husband, what will you take an interest in? It's natural—not to say primitive. Do you know, he says I'm the most primitive person he ever came across. Should you say I was primitive? Don't answer that. I don't think he'd like me to talk about him quite so much. He thinks I never know where to draw the line. But I never see any lines to draw, and if I did, I wouldn't know how to draw them."
Stanistreet smiled grimly. He was wondering whether she was "primitive."
"Just look at Scarum's ears! Don't tease her. She doesn't like it. Dear thing! She's delicious to kiss—she's got such a soft nose. But she'll bolt as soon as look at you, and she's awfully hard to hold." Her fingers were twitching with the desire to hold Scarum.
"I think I can manage her."
"You see, somehow or the other I like talking to you. You may be a sinner, but I don't think you are a fool; and I've a sort of a notion that you understand."
He was silent. So many women had thought he understood.
"I wonder—do you understand!"
The eyes that Mrs. Nevill Tyson turned on Stanistreet were not search-lights; they were wells of darkness, unsearchable, unfathomable.
Something in Stanistreet, equally inscrutable, something that was himself and not himself, answered very low to that vague appeal.
"Yes, I understand."
He had turned towards her, smiling darkly, and all her face flashed back a happy smile.
Surely, oh surely, Mrs. Nevill Tyson was the soul of indiscretion; for at that moment Miss Batchelor, trotting past with Lady Morley, looked from them to her companion and smiled too.
That smile was the first stone.
Miss Batchelor acknowledged them with a curt little nod, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson's face became instantly overclouded. Louis leaned a little nearer and said in a husky, uneven voice, "Surely you don't mind that impertinent woman?"
"Not a bit," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson. "She's got a villainous seat."
"Then what are you thinking about?"
"I'm thinking what horrid hard lines it is that they won't let me hunt. All the time I might have been flying across country with Nevill, instead of—"
"Instead of crawling in a dog-cart with me. Thank you, Mrs. Nevill."
"You needn't thank me. I haven't given you anything."
Again Stanistreet wondered whether Mrs. Nevill was very simple or very profound. And wondering, he gave the mare a cut across the flanks that made her leap in the shafts.
"That was silly of you. She'll have her heels through before you know where you are. She's a demon to kick, is Scarum."
Scarum had spared the splash-board this time, but she was going furiously, and the little dog-cart rocked from side to side. Mrs. Nevill Tyson rose to her feet.
"Strikes me you can't drive a little bit," said she.
"Please sit down, Mrs. Tyson." But Mrs. Tyson remained imperiously standing, trying to keep her balance like a small sailor in a rollicking sea.
"Get up."
Stanistreet muttered wrathfully under his mustache, and she caught the words "damned foolery."
"Bundle out this minute." She made a grab at the rail in an undignified manner.
He doubled the reins firmly over his right hand, and with his left arm he forced her back into her seat. He was holding her there when Farmer Ashby turned out of a by-lane and followed close behind them. And Farmer Ashby had a nice tale to tell at "The Cross-Roads" of how he had seen the Captain driving with his arm round Mrs. Tyson's waist.
That was another stone.
Stanistreet tugged at the reins with both hands and pulled the mare almost on to her haunches; her hoofs shrieked on the iron road; she stood still and snorted, her forelegs well out, her hide smoking.
When he had made quite sure that the animal's attitude was that of temporary exhaustion rather than of passion, Stanistreet changed seats, and gave the reins to Mrs. Nevill Tyson; and Scarum burst into her second heat.
"I suppose you have a right to drive your own animal into the ditch," said he.
Mrs. Nevill Tyson set her teeth with a determined air, planted her feet firmly on the floor of the trap to give herself a good purchase; she gave the reins a little twist as she had seen Stanistreet do, she balanced the whip like a fishing-rod, with the line dangling over Scarum's ears, and then she rattled away over the wrinkling roads at a glorious pace; she reeled over cart-ruts, she went thump over sods and bump over mud-heaps, she grazed walls and hedges, skimmed over the brink of ditches, careened round corners, and tore past most things on the wrong side; and Stanistreet's sense of deadly peril was lost in the pleasure of seeing her do it. When she was not chattering to him she was encouraging Scarum with all sorts of endearments, small chirping sounds and delicate chuckles, smiling that indefinably malicious, lop-sided smile which Stanistreet had been taught all his life to interpret as a challenge. Now they were going down a lane of beeches, they bent their heads under the branches, and a shower of rime fell about her shoulders, powdering her black hair; he watched it thawing in the warmth there till it sparkled like a fine dew; and now they were running between low hedges, and the keen air from the frosted fields smote the blood into her cheeks and the liquid light into her eyes; it lifted the fringe from her forehead and crisped it over the fur border of her hat; flying ends of lace and sable were flung behind her like streamers; she seemed to be winged with the wind of speed; she was the embodiment of vivid, reckless, beautiful life.
It