The three, horse and dog and man, set off again. Down from the crest they came at a canter, through fields ridged yellow with buttercups, where the young lambs frisked bleating from their path, by blazing hawthorn-hedges a-chatter with startled finches, through the pasture-gates, to the little wooden bridge over the Brook. Now, on a slope above them, they saw the bright new green of Spaxton's Covert; five acres of blessed woodland whither, on some dark November afternoon, a dog-fox hard-pressed from Lomondham Ruffs or Highborough Gorse might, if only scent failed, perchance make safety from the beaten pack.

But to-day the dog-fox feared neither pack nor horseman. They saw him, a red shape at covert's edge; saw him grin at them from fifty yards' range, and lope disdainfully back through the wooden palings to his mate!

Ronnie, laughing at the incident, halted Miracle, dismounted, and called the rabbit-eager Ponto to heel. The half-hour or so of open air had steadied his nerves. Lighting a cigarette, looking at his watch, he saw that his hands no longer trembled. "Alie's all right," he said to himself. "Everything's all right."

He mounted again, and headed away from the covert toward Lomondham. From Lomondham to Little Overdine by the highroad is four good miles. "That'll get me home comfortably by five," thought Ronnie. But just before he made the Lomondham road, fear gripped him again. Suddenly some instinct, an instinct so strong that he dared not even fight against it, warned him that Alie was in danger.

And with fear came self-reproach. He had been away a whole hour, a whole hour of life or death for the woman he loved. He had been enjoying himself, enjoying himself, dreaming of a son when perhaps--perhaps----

Miracle, trotting at ease, felt himself abruptly gathered together, felt the ring of the snaffle hard against his off cheek, felt the grass at roadside under his hoofs, broke to a canter and from a canter to a gallop. Ponto, caught unawares fifty yards in rear, heard man and horse disappear round a bend in the hawthorn hedges; Ponto, quickening his lollop round the bend, saw the pair streak hell-for-leather up the hill; Ponto, laboring desperately not to be left behind, saw them halt for a moment at the gate of Lomondham Lane and knew that his master had taken the short cut home. "He can't have forgotten me," thought Ponto angrily.

But Ronnie, in that moment of fear, had forgotten everything except Aliette. The lane saved a mile and a half, and the lane was all soft turf--good going--the first five furlongs of it straight as a race-course.

Down those first five furlongs Miracle went like a steed possessed. The turf thudded under his hoofs. The hawthorn-hedges streaked past him like snowbanks alongside a train. "Hope to God we don't meet any one at the bend," thought Ronnie, his silk-socked ankles thrust home in the irons, his trousered knees gripping the saddle-flaps, his hands low and his body a little forward.

For now there was no controlling Miracle. The fear of the thoroughbred man on his back had communicated itself in some mysterious way to the thoroughbred horse. He, too, wanted to get home. Grandly he swept the ground from under him. Scarcely, with voice and rein, Ronnie succeeded in checking speed as they tore madly round the bend; scarcely, leaning hard over, he succeeded in keeping his seat.

And then, abruptly, he remembered the tree!

The tree, a great elm, overturned by the gale, was a bare four hundred yards on, just around the next bend, beyond the bridge that arched up like the back of a big red hog from the green of the lane.

"Steady, Miracle," called Ronnie, "steady, you old fool. This isn't the National." He was still terribly frightened about Alie; but for himself he had no fear. Even when his horse, head down, neck-muscles arched against the reins, took the red bridge as though it had been a water-jump, it never struck Ronnie that he wouldn't be able to stop him.

Two hundred yards from the tree, he still intended to pull up. Miracle, with no corn in him, couldn't hold that pace another furlong. Miracle, when he caught sight of those jagged branches blocking the path, would ease up of his own accord. Miracle had never bolted in his life....

But Miracle came round that last bend as though it had been Tattenham Corner; and Miracle's rider, peering between his ears at the forbidding obstacle fifty yards ahead, knew that it would be fatal to try and stop him. As a matter of cold fact, he didn't want to stop the horse. The overturned tree, unlopped, five feet high and eight across, lay between him and Aliette: once over it, five minutes would see them home!

Ronnie took one pull at the reins, sat down in his saddle, grasped Miracle between his knees, sent up one voiceless prayer for safety, flicked once with his ashplant, felt the great horse steady himself hocks-under-body, felt his forehand lift, gave him his head--went up, down and over, his shoulders almost touching the croup--and landed like a steeple-chase jock to a crackle of twigs on the turf beyond.

Then, at long last, the tree fifty yards behind and the highroad half a mile ahead, Miracle answered to the rein. Gradually his pace checked from gallop to hand-canter; from hand-canter to a quick nervous trot that sent the loose stones scudding from his hoofs.

"Good lad," said Ronnie, easing as they emerged from lane to highroad. "Good lad," he repeated, as Miracle--scarcely sweating--clattered swiftly through the stable-gateway and stood for dismounting.

For somehow, even as he swung-from saddle, Ronnie knew that Alie's danger was over, so that it hardly needed the returned Driver's cheery grin and cheery words, "It's a boy, sir. Kate's just come out and told us," to reassure him.