d
Perry.

"Mr. Delamayn will tell me, you rude man!"

"That depends, ma'am, on whether _I_ tell _him._"

With this reply, Perry hurried back to the cottage.

Not a word passed while the trainer was attending to his man, and while
the man was recovering his breath. When Geoffrey had been carefully
rubbed down, and clothed again in his ordinary garments, Perry pulled
a comfortable easy-chair out of a corner. Geoffrey fell into the
chair, rather than sat down in it. Perry started, and looked at him
attentively.

"Well?" said Geoffrey. "How about the time? Long? short? or middling?"

"Very good time," said Perry.

"How long?"

"When did you say the lady was going, Mr. Delamayn?"

"In two days."

"Very well, Sir. I'll tell you 'how long' when the lady's gone."

Geoffrey made no attempt to insist on an immediate reply. He smiled
faintly. After an interval of less than ten minutes he stretched out his
legs and closed his eyes.

"Going to sleep?" said Perry.

Geoffrey opened his eyes with an effort. "No," he said. The word had
hardly passed his lips before his eyes closed again.

"Hullo!" said Perry, watching him. "I don't like that."

He went closer to the chair. There was no doubt about it. The man was
asleep.

Perry emitted a long whistle under his breath. He stooped and laid two
of his fingers softly on Geoffrey's pulse. The beat was slow, heavy, and
labored. It was unmistakably the pulse of an exhausted man.

The trainer changed color, and took a turn in the room. He opened a
cupboard, and produced from it his diary of the preceding year. The
entries relating to the last occasion on which he had prepared Geoffrey
for a foot-race included the fullest details. He turned to the report
of the first trial, at three hundred yards, full speed. The time was,
by one or two seconds, not so good as the time on this occasion. But the
result, afterward, was utterly different. There it was, in Perry's own
words: "Pulse good. Man in high spirits. Ready, if I would have let him,
to run it over again."

Perry looked round at the same man, a year afterward--utterly worn out,
and fast asleep in the chair.

He fetched pen, ink, and paper out of the cupboard, and wrote two
letters--both marked "Private." The first was to a medical man, a great
authority among trainers. The second was to Perry's own agent in
London, whom he knew he could trust. The letter pledged the agent to the
strictest secrecy, and directed him to