The sight of the Rev. Adrian disturbed further musing. He tittuped out of the rectory drive as they came by--a little clean-shaven creature, jovially wrinkled, his short legs in their canvas gaiters gripping the flanks of a cock-throppled bay mare with a bobbed tail and a roving eye. The Rev. Adrian on Thumbs Up contrived, somehow, to look far more like a keeper than the proverbial hunting parson.

"Morning, Aliette," he greeted. Then, before she could introduce Ronnie, "I say, didn't you and I meet at Jaffa?"

"We did." Ronnie laughed. "Delightful spot."

Explanations over, they rode three abreast past the slate-roofed cottages, the Rev. Adrian acknowledging with perfunctory bridle-hand the salutes of his parishioners; and veered left along a metaled road between high telegraph-poles.

"Are you stopping at Titterton's?" asked the parson, eying Ronnie's gray.

"No. He couldn't manage me a room. I'm putting up at the pub in Key Hatch just for the week-end."

"Do they do you well at the Bull?"

"Not badly."

They jogged on, Adrian and Ronnie chatting. Aliette rather silent. An open car, whose occupant waved greeting, purred past. Miracle shied, bumping the gray.

"Dash that fellow Moss! Why can't he ride to the meet like a Christian?" muttered the parson.

Ahead of them, on the straight white of the road, they could see various other horsemen and horsewomen, a slow-moving dogcart, and two or three figures a-wheel. They overhauled and passed a flaxen-haired young farmer, very red of face and waistcoat, on an unclipped four-year-old; they added to their cavalcade a surly-eyed woman with weatherbeaten features who straddled a ewe-necked black, and answered to the inappropriate name of "Lady Helen." They came upon the dogcart, and Aliette reined alongside for a chat. The parson and Lady Helen jogged on.

"Mr. Cavendish--Mrs. O'Riordan," introduced Aliette.

The lady in the dogcart appeared to fill it, dwarfing the man at her side. She was a vast, voluptuous blond, full-nosed and full-lipped, slightly too well tweeded for the country. Her blue eyes, as they surveyed Aliette and Ronnie, held that peculiar twinkle common to all over-sexed women; they seemed to be pondering the problem, "Has Aliette at last found a lover?"

Mrs. O'Riordan herself, after a hectic but--with one exception--camouflaged career, had recently settled down to her second (and, she believed, final) adventure in matrimony. The "exception," a semi-literary, semi-theatrical Irish land-owner who drove the dogcart, had caused her considerable trouble to capture; trouble which involved an elopement, a year of uncertainty, a brace of arranged divorces, various columns of undesirable publicity in the Sunday papers, and the loss of several influential acquaintances. During these troubles Aliette, an old school-friend, had championed Mary O'Riordan's cause; and earned, by so doing, if not gratitude at least a very tolerable counterfeit thereof.

Ronnie's horse, bucking violently at a passing cyclist, interrupted conversation. The riders trotted on.

"Nice man," commented Mary O'Riordan.

"Good-looking woman, Aliette," remarked her husband.

Mary O'Riordan eyed her new male possession jealously. He was very attractive to the sex, this dark-haired, lantern-jowled Irishman she had captured from his first wife. It displeased her to hear him admire other women--especially women like Aliette, whose poised slimness set her own hoydenish bulk at such disadvantage.