rofitable
sale of his South African farm and stud, and observing that the sun
seldom shone, Val had said to himself: "I've absolutely got to have an
interest in life, or this country will give me the blues. Hunting's not
enough, I'll breed and I'll train." With just that extra pinch of
shrewdness and decision imparted by long residence in a new country, Val
had seen the weak point of modern breeding. They were all hypnotised by
fashion and high price. He should buy for looks, and let names go hang!
And here he was already, hypnotised by the prestige of a certain strain
of blood! Half-consciously, he thought: 'There's something in this damned
climate which makes one go round in a ring. All the same, I must have a
strain of Mayfly blood.'

In this mood he reached the Mecca of his hopes. It was one of those
quiet meetings favourable to such as wish to look into horses, rather
than into the mouths of bookmakers; and Val clung to the paddock. His
twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he
had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and
given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called "the silly
haw-haw" of some Englishmen, the "flapping cockatoory" of some
English-women--Holly had none of that and Holly was his model.
Observant, quick, resourceful, Val went straight to the heart of a
transaction, a horse, a drink; and he was on his way to the heart of a
Mayfly filly, when a slow voice said at his elbow:

"Mr. Val Dartie? How's Mrs. Val Dartie? She's well, I hope." And he
saw beside him the Belgian he had met at his sister Imogen's.

"Prosper Profond--I met you at lunch," said the voice.

"How are you?" murmured Val.

"I'm very well," replied Monsieur Profond, smiling with a certain
inimitable slowness. "A good devil," Holly had called him. Well! He
looked a little like a devil, with his dark, clipped, pointed beard; a
sleepy one though, and good-humoured, with fine eyes, unexpectedly
intelligent.

"Here's a gentleman wants to know you--cousin of yours--Mr. George
Forsyde."

Val saw a large form, and a face clean-shaven, bull-like, a little
lowering, with sardonic humour bubbling behind a full grey eye; he
remembered it dimly from old days when he would dine with his father at
the Iseeum Club.

"I used to go racing with your father," George was saying: "How's the
stud? Like to buy one of my screws?"

Val grinned, to hide the sudden fee