"Dear old Ragamuffin!" he said.

She seemed to quaver in the dusk.

"You mustn't," she said, in strained and muffled voice, and for a moment
laid a finger on his arm.

Next day, as they were making their Sunday round of the horses together,
Silver stopped at Heart of Oak's box.

"I don't quite know what to be at with this poor old cormorant," he
said, slow and cogitating. "I'm looking for a home for him. But there
are no bidders. A bit too good a doer, I guess. Eat 'em out of hearth
and home."

The girl's eyes flashed on his face and away again.

"He's not old," she said, as her hand stroked the pony's neck.

"Well, he's like me," the young man replied. "He's older than he was."

Boy made a cursory inspection of the pony's mouth.

"Eleven off," she said.

"That's too old to play polo."

She believed it to be a lie, but she did not think she was sufficient an
authority on the game to justify her in saying so.

"Anyway, I'm getting too heavy for him," Silver went on. "Joint too big
for the dish, as they say. That fellow's more my sort, ain't you, old
lad?" He nodded to the next loose-box, where his seventeen-hand hunter,
Banjo, stood, blowing at them through the bars. "What Heart of Oak wants
is a nice light weight just to hack him about the Downs and ease him
down into the grave."

That evening after supper Jim Silver sang.

Apart from the members of the Eton Mission Clubs there were perhaps a
dozen men in the world--Eton men all, boating men most--who knew that he
did "perform," to use their expression; and just two women--Boy Woodburn
and her mother. Old Mat, to be sure, did not count, for he always slept
through the "performance."

The young man's repertoire consisted of two songs--_The Place Where the
Old Horse Died_ and _My Old Dutch_.

With a good natural voice, entirely untrained, he sang with a deep and
quiet feeling that made his friends affirm that once you had heard
Silver Mug's--

_We've been together now for forty years,
And it don't seem a day too much,
There ain't a lady livin' in the land
As I'd swop for my dear old Dutch._

you would never listen to Albert Chevalier again.

That, of course, was the just and admirable exaggeration of youth and
friendship.

But it was the fact that always after the young man had sung there was
an unusually prolonged silence, and, as Amersham once said, you felt as
if you were in church.

This evening,