ous. He snapped at me before I mounted. It's no
good postponing it. He'll have to have it." Violet spoke as if she were
discussing the mechanism of a machine. "You go on up the drive, my dear,
while I take him across the turf."

But Olga lingered. "Violet, really--I know he will throw you or bolt
with you. I wish you wouldn't."

Violet's laugh had a ring of scorn. "My dear child, if I were afraid of
that, I had better give up riding him altogether."

"I wish you would," said Olga. "He is much too strong for a woman to
manage."

Violet laughed again, this time with sheer amusement, and then, with
dark eyes that flashed in the sunlight, she slashed the animal's flank
with her riding-whip. He uttered a snort that was like an exclamation of
rage, and leaped clean off the ground. Striking it again, he reared, but
received a stinging cut over the ears that brought him down. Then
furiously he kicked and plunged, catching the whip all over his glossy
body, till with a furious squeal he flung himself forward and galloped
headlong away.

Olga stood on the drive and watched with lips slightly compressed. She
knew that as an exhibition of skilled horsemanship the spectacle she had
just witnessed was faultless; but it gave her no pleasure, and there was
no admiration in the eyes that followed the distant galloping figure
with the merciless whip that continued active as long as she could see
it.

As horse and rider passed from sight beyond a clump of trees, she
remounted her bicycle, and rode slowly towards the house.

Old and grey and weather-stained, the walls of Brethaven Priory shone in
the hot sunlight. It had been built in Norman days a full mile and a
half inland; but more than the mile had disappeared in the course of the
crumbling centuries, and only a stretch of gleaming hillside now
intervened between it and the sea. The wash and roar of the Channel and
the crying of gulls swept over the grass-clad space as though already
claim had been laid to the old grey building that had weathered so many
gales. Undoubtedly the place was doomed. There was something eerily
tragic about it even on that shining August afternoon, a shadow
indefinable of which Olga had been conscious even in her childish days.

She looked over her shoulder several times as she rode in the direction
in which her friend had disappeared, but she saw no sign of her.
Finally, reaching the house, she went round to a shed at the back, in
which she was ac