The paddock, a square two-acre of trampled grasses fenced with the high white of blossoming hawthorn, shimmered in the afternoon sunshine; and at far end of it, as he opened the gate, Ronnie saw Miracle. At the click of the gate-latch, the big thoroughbred, golden as a guinea to the rich light, lifted his head from the fragrant pasture; scrutinized his visitors; and with a whinny of delight came cantering toward them. Ten yards away, he stopped--his neck arched, his eyes wide in speculation. Then, pace by balancing pace, muzzle outstretched, he came on; snuffled down at the dog; snuffled up at the man.

Tactfully as Aliette's self Ronnie gentled the horse, caressing the smooth muzzle, the sleek skin under the branches of the jaws. Somehow, it seemed as though Miracle were aware of the fret in him, of the fret in Ponto; as though Miracle, following the pair of them up and down the paddock, were trying to say: "It's all right. It's quite all right."

And Ronnie thought, looking at Miracle's great shoulders, at the slope of his pasterns and the sinuous strength of his hocks: "You carried her over Parson's Brook, old boy. You'll carry her again, next winter, as you carried me this, across a stiller country than Mid-Oxfordshire, across the ridge-and-furrow and the cut-and-laids and the timber of the shires."

Miracle followed the pair of them back to the gate, and stood looking over it while they made their way to the stables. The big blue clock under the old-fashioned hunting wind-vane (a metal man on a metal horse capping on a metal hound) showed ten minutes to four. In the center of the deserted courtyard--ominous--stood Hartley's car. Toward it, through the archway, came the doctor himself.

Ronnie's heart sank at sight of the man. "Anything gone wrong?" he asked curtly.

"On the contrary." Hartley, a big-shouldered fellow who rode like a thruster and looked more like a vet. than a county practitioner, laughed under his large mustache. "On the contrary. Everything's going splendidly. If only we could get you husbands out of the way at these times----"

"How much longer?" interrupted Ronnie.

"Two hours at the least." The doctor abstracted a small package from the dickey of his car. "We can't rush our fences at this game, you know."

"Is my wife in pain?"

"Of course she's in pain."

"Bad pain?"

"Good Lord, no. Nothing out of the ordinary. She's a Trojan, is your missus, Cavendish." And Hartley, stuffing the package into a capacious pocket, added. "As a matter of fact, it seems to me that you're looking a jolly sight worse than she is. Why don't you take my advice, and get on a gee-gee for an hour or so? We don't want you kicking about the house, I can tell you."

The doctor hurried off through the archway toward the house, leaving Ronnie a little ashamed of himself. Hartley, for all his coarseness, knew his job. He began to wonder whether it wouldn't be a sound scheme to follow Hartley's advice, and go out for a ride. Driver, the groom, had asked for the Saturday afternoon off; but he could easily saddle up one of the hacks in the loose-boxes, either the old brown mare, Daisy, or the little bay horse which he had bought--a week since--as a surprise for Aliette on her convalescence.

Ronnie, Ponto still at his heels, made his way into the unlocked harness-room; picked a saddle from its rack, a snaffle bridle from its peg; and emerged again into the courtyard.

"Which shall it be?" he thought, "Daisy or the bay?" And hesitating in his choice, it came to him, quite suddenly, that if he really were going to ride--if, despite the apprehensions which had once more started nagging at his mind, he really meant to disregard the pull of that invisible halter which bound him to the house where Aliette lay in pain--then the only horse possible for him to ride was Miracle.

Why not? The thoroughbred had only been "lying out" a week. An hour's exercise wouldn't do him any harm. He'd enjoy, perhaps, a little canter across the grass to Spaxton's Covert.

Wonderingly, Ponto followed his master back to the paddock. Miracle still had his head across the gate; nor, when he saw the saddle over Ronnie's right arm, the bridle in his left hand, did he sulk away. The big golden-gleaming horse seemed rather pleased than sulky to feel the brow-band slipped up his forehead, the snaffle-bar slipped into his mouth, the throat-lash of the bridle buckled loose, and the saddle-girths gripping him. He tossed at his bit and hogged his back in the old playful way as Ronnie--the ashplant in his left hand--put an unhorsemanly-shod foot into the iron and swung an unhorsemanly-trousered leg over the cantle.

As the three of them, horse and dog and man, set off across the paddock, Ronnie knew the impulse to turn back, to off-saddle. It seemed heartless that he should ride out across green fields while Alie--had not Hartley himself admitted?--was in pain. But half-way across the two-acre the impulse weakened; and by the time they made the far gate it had altogether died away.

He unlatched the gate with his ashplant, and Miracle nipped through. Before them, up-and-down emerald between rolling grasses, lay the bridle-path to Spaxton's Covert. The horse, at a touch of the rein, broke from walk to trot, from trot to a springy canter that traversed the ridge-and-furrow without an effort. Southerly breezes blew across the sixty-acre pasture. Two hares, mating, scurried from their approach. The great horned beasts, white-faced Herefords and black Welsh steers, watched them incuriously till--catching sight of Ponto--they, too, moved lumbering away.

At the crest, Ronnie drew rein. Here, they were on the very spine of the county. Looking back, he could still see the high chimney-stacks and the stable-clock of Windmill House: but already Little Overdine had tucked itself away into a cup of the vale; so that only its church-tower and the motionless sails of the windmill betrayed it from the humpy fields through which Little Overdine Brook serpentined like a gigantic green caterpillar.

Mapwise, from that high eminence, the shires outspread their panorama, pasture on rolling pasture, with here a bright square of young green cornland, here a dark blob of covert, here a blue hill and there a vale, here a great house nestling among trees, there a red farm, there a church, and there a white railway-gate, but scarce a factory chimney from horizon to horizon.

Not for nothing do men hark back to the place of their father's birth! To Ronnie, ever since he had first set eyes on this panorama, it had been home. Already he knew its every landmark; already it had power over him, power to soothe, power to set him a-dream.

And to-day, more than ever before, the shires set their spell upon him, so that he imagined--sitting there motionless on the motionless horse--a son soon to be born, a son who would esteem the Tudor house on the brow of Little Overdine Hill, and all this wide champaign, these counties which were neither pretty-pretty as the garden South, nor rocked and sea-girt as the West, nor grandly cragged and forested as the North, but just--so Ronnie put it to himself that afternoon--just England, the old England of bold horses and bold hounds and bolder men.