and kept one, it
was the latter event which caused him, if anything, the greater surprise,
while jogging back to town from Robin Hill after his ride with Holly.
She had been even prettier than he had thought her yesterday, on her
silver-roan, long-tailed 'palfrey'; and it seemed to him, self-critical
in the brumous October gloaming and the outskirts of London, that only
his boots had shone throughout their two-hour companionship. He took out
his new gold 'hunter'--present from James--and looked not at the time,
but at sections of his face in the glittering back of its opened case.
He had a temporary spot over one eyebrow, and it displeased him, for it
must have displeased her. Crum never had any spots. Together with Crum
rose the scene in the promenade of the Pandemonium. To-day he had not
had the faintest desire to unbosom himself to Holly about his father.
His father lacked poetry, the stirrings of which he was feeling for the
first time in his nineteen years. The Liberty, with Cynthia Dark, that
almost mythical embodiment of rapture; the Pandemonium, with the woman of
uncertain age--both seemed to Val completely 'off,' fresh from communion
with this new, shy, dark-haired young cousin of his. She rode 'Jolly
well,' too, so that it had been all the more flattering that she had let
him lead her where he would in the long gallops of Richmond Park, though
she knew them so much better than he did. Looking back on it all, he was
mystified by the barrenness of his speech; he felt that he could say 'an
awful lot of fetching things' if he had but the chance again, and the
thought that he must go back to Littlehampton on the morrow, and to
Oxford on the twelfth--'to that beastly exam,' too--without the faintest
chance of first seeing her again, caused darkness to settle on his spirit
even more quickly than on the evening. He should write to her, however,
and she had promised to answer. Perhaps, too, she would come up to
Oxford to see her brother. That thought was like the first star, which
came out as he rode into Padwick's livery stables in the purlieus of
Sloane Square. He got off and stretched himself luxuriously, for he had
ridden some twenty-five good miles. The Dartie within him made him
chaffer for five minutes with young Padwick concerning the favourite for
the Cambridgeshire; then with the words, "Put the gee down to my
account," he walked away, a little wide at the knees, and flipping his
boots with his knotty