existence. They must bow
to the workings of it along with the rest.

But one wretched, little chap fairly blubbered. He had been kicked in
the stomach some three weeks earlier, and had been in hospital. This
was his first morning out. He had grown soft, and was light-headed, his
knees all of a shake. By means of voluminous threats Preiston got him
up. But he sat his horse all of a huddle, as limp as a half-empty sack
of chaff. Richard looked on feeling, not pity, but only irritation,
finally amounting to anger. The child's whole aspect and the sniveling
sounds he made were so hatefully ugly. It disgusted him.

"Here Chifney, leave that fellow at home," he said. "He's no good."

"He's malingering, Sir Richard. I know his sort. Give in to him now and
we shall have the same game, and worse, over again to-morrow."

"Very probably," Richard answered. "Only it is evident he has no more
hand and no more grip than a sick cat to-day. We shall have some mess
with him, and I'm not in the humour for a mess, so just leave him.
There boy, stop crying. Do you hear?" he added, wheeling round on the
small unfortunate. "Mr. Chifney'll give you another day off, and the
doctor will see you. Only if he reports you fit and you give the very
least trouble to-morrow, you'll be turned out of the stables there and
then. We've no use for shirkers. Do you understand?"

In spite of his irritation, the hardness of Richard's expression
relaxed as he finished speaking. The poor, little beggar was so
abject--too abject indeed for common decency, since he too, after all,
was human. Richard's own self-respect made it incumbent upon him to
lift the creature out of the pit of so absolutely unseemly a
degradation. He looked kindly at him, smiled, and promptly forgot all
about him. While to the boy it seemed that the gods had verily
descended in the likeness of men, and he would have bartered his
little, dirty, blear-eyed rudiment of a soul thenceforward for another
such a look from Richard Calmady.

Dickie promptly forgot the boy, yet some virtue must have been in the
episode for he began to feel better in himself. As the horses filed
away through the misty sunshine--Preiston riding beside the fourth or
fifth of the string, while Richard and Chifney brought up the rear, his
chestnut suiting its paces to the shorter stride of the trainer's
cob--the fever of the night cooled down in him. Half thankfully, half
amusedly, he perceived things begin to assu