Bertie Pemberton stuck close by Beatrix's side as they trotted easily with the crowd up to the wood which was first to be drawn.

"They won't find anything here," he said; "they never do. They'll draw Beeching Copse next. Let's go off there, shall we? Lots of others will."

In her ignorance and his assurance of what was likely to happen, she allowed herself to follow his lead. The 'lots of others' proved to be those of the runners who were knowing enough to run risks so as to spare themselves, and a few experienced horsemen who shared Bertie's opinion; but there were enough of them to make the move not too conspicuous. Bertie found the occasion he wanted, and made use of it at once.

"I say, I know you're a pal of Mollie Walter's," he said. "Is there any chance for me?"

Beatrix was rather taken aback by this directness, having anticipated nothing more than veiled enquiries from which she would gain some amusement and interest in divining exactly how far he had gone upon the road which she thought Mollie was also traversing.

"Why do you ask me that?" she said, after a slight pause. "Why don't you ask her?"

"Well, because I don't want to make a fool of myself. I believe she likes me, but I don't know."

"Do you want me to find out for you, then?" she asked, after another pause.

"I thought you'd give me a tip," he said. "I know you're a pal of hers. I suppose she talks about things to you."

"Of course she talks about things to me."

"Yes? Well!"

She kept silence.

"Is it any good?" he asked again.

"How should I know?" asked Beatrix. "You don't suppose she's confided in me that she's dying for love of you!"

He turned to look at her. Her pretty face was pink, and a trifle scornful. "Oh, I say!" he exclaimed. "What have I said to put you in a bait?"

"Are you in love with her?" asked Beatrix.

"I should think you could see that, can't you?" he said, with a slight droop. "I don't know that I've taken particular pains to hide it."

"Well then, why don't you tell her so? It's the usual thing to do, isn't it?"

He laughed. "Which brings us back to where we were before," he said.

"I'm not going to give you any encouragement," said Beatrix. "If you really love her, and don't ask her without wanting to know beforehand what she'll say—well, of course, you can't really love her."

Somewhat to her surprise, and a little to her dismay, he seemed to be considering this. "Well, I don't want to make a mistake," he said. "I'll tell you how it is. I never seem to get beyond a certain point with her. I know this, that if she'd just give me a little something, I should be head over ears. Then I shouldn't want to ask you or anybody. I should go straight in. That's how it is."

Beatrix was interested in this disclosure. It threw a light upon the mysterious nature of man's love, as inflammable material which needs a spark to set it ablaze. In a rapid review of her own case she saw exactly where she had provided the spark, and the hint of a question came to her, which there was no time to examine into, as to which of the two really comes to a decision first, the man or the woman.

She would not, however, admit to him that it was to be expected of a girl that she should indicate the answer she would give to a question before it had been asked. She also wanted to find out if there was any feeling in his mind that he would not be doing well for himself and his family if he should marry Mollie. On her behalf she was prepared to resent such an idea, and to tell him quite frankly what she thought about it.

"Don't you think she's worth taking a little risk about?" she asked.

"She's worth anything," he said simply, and she liked him for the speech, but stuck to her exploratory purpose.

"If you've made it so plain that you want her," she said, "I suppose your people know about it. What do they say?"

"Say? They don't say anything. I've paid attentions to young women before, you know. It's supposed to be rather a habit of mine."

She liked this speech much less. "Perhaps that's why Mollie doesn't accept them with the gratitude you seem to expect of her," she said. "I don't like your way of talking about her."

"Talking about her? What do you mean? I've said nothing about her at all, except that I think she's the sweetest thing in the world. At least I haven't said that, but I've implied it, haven't I? Anyhow, that's what I do think."

"Haven't you thought that about the others you're so proud of having paid attention to?"

"I didn't say I was proud of it. How you do take a fellow up. Yes, perhaps I have thought it once or twice. I don't want to make myself out what I'm not."

He was dead honest, she thought, but still wasn't quite sure that he was worthy of her dear Mollie; or even that he was enough in love with her to make it desirable that he should marry her. But Beatrix, innocent and childish as she was in many ways, had yet seen too much of the world not to have her ideas touched by the worldly aspects of marriage, for others, at least, if not for herself. Bertie Pemberton would be a very good 'match' for Mollie; and she knew already that Mollie 'liked' him, though she had no intention of telling him so.

"Will your people like your marrying Mollie—if you do?" she asked.

"Like it! Of course they'll like it They're devilish fond of her, the whole lot of them. Why shouldn't they like it?"

She didn't answer, and he repeated the question, "Why shouldn't they like it?"

"I thought perhaps they might want you to marry somebody with money, or something of that sort," she said, forced to answer, but feeling as if she had fixed herself with the unworthy ideas she had sought to find in him.

He added to her confusion by saying: "I shouldn't have thought that sort of thing would have come into your head. I suppose what you really mean is that there'd be an idea of my marrying out of my beat, so to speak, if I took Mollie."

"If you took Mollie!" she echoed, angry with herself and therefore more angry with him. "What a way to talk! I think Mollie's far too good for you. Too good in every way, and I mean that. It's only that I know how people of your sort do look at things—and because she lives in a little cottage and you in a— Oh, you make me angry."

He laughed at her. There was no doubt about his easy temper. "Look here," he said. "Let's get it straight. I'm not a snob, and my people aren't snobs. As for money—well, I suppose it's always useful, if it's there; but if it isn't—well, it's going to be all the more my show. There'll be enough to get along on. If I could have the luck to get that girl for my own, I should settle down here, and look after the place, and be as happy as a king. The old governor would like that, and so would the girls. And they'd all make a lot of her. Everybody about here who knows her likes her, and I should be as proud as Punch of her. You know what she's like yourself. There's nobody to beat her. She's a bit shy now, because she hasn't been about as much as people like you have; but I like her all the better for that. She's like something—I hope you won't laugh at me—it's like finding a jewel where you didn't expect it. She's never been touched—well, I suppose I mean she's unspotted by the world, as they read out in church the other day. I thought to myself, Yes, that's Mollie. She isn't like other girls one may have taken a fancy to at some time or another."

Beatrix liked him again now. They had reached the copse where the next draw would be made, and were standing in a corner at its edge. She stole a glance at him sitting easily on his tall horse and found him a proper sort of man, in spite of his lack of the finer qualities. Perhaps he did not lack them so much as his very ordinary speech and behaviour had seemed to indicate. She had pictured him taking a fancy to Mollie, and willing to gratify it in passing over the obvious differences between his situation in the world and hers. But his last speech had shown him to have found an added attraction in her not having been brought up in his world, and it did him credit, for it meant to him something good and quiet towards which his thoughts were turned, and not at all the unsuitability which many men of his sort would have seen in it.

There was a look on his ordinary, rather unmeaning face which touched Beatrix. "I like you for saying that," she said frankly. "It's what anybody who can see things ought to think about darling Mollie. I'm sorry I said just now that you weren't really good enough for her."

He looked up and laughed again, the gravity passing from his face. "Well, it was rather rough," he said, "though it's what I feel myself, you know. Makes you ashamed of having knocked about—you know what I mean. Or perhaps you don't. But men aren't as good as girls. But when you fall in love with a girl like Mollie—well, you want to chuck it all, and make yourself something different—more suitable, if you know what I mean. That's the way it takes you; or ought to when you're really in love with somebody who's worth it."

She liked him better every moment. A dim sense of realities came to her, together with the faintest breath of discomfort, as her own case, always present with her while she was discussing that of another, presented itself from this angle. She had been very scornful of Bertie's frank admission that there had been others before Mollie. But weren't there always others, with men? If a true love wiped them out, and made the man wish he had brought his first love to the girl, as he so much revered her for bringing hers to him, then the past should be forgiven him; he was washed clean of it. It was the New Birth in the religion of Love. Mollie represented purity and innocence to this ordinary unreflective young man, and something good in him went out to meet it, and sloughed off the unworthiness in him. His chance of regeneration had been given him.

"If you feel like that about her," she said, "I don't know what you meant when you said she hadn't given you enough encouragement to make you take the risk with her."

His face took on its graver look again. "I don't know that I quite know what I meant myself," he said. "I suppose—in a way—it's two sorts of love. At least, one is mixed up with the other. Oh, I don't know. I can't explain things like that."

But Beatrix, without experience to guide her, but with her keen feminine sense for the bases of things, had a glimmering. The lighter love, which was all this young man had known hitherto, would need response to set it aflame. He was tangled in his own past. The finer love that had come to him was shrinking and fearful, set its object on a pedestal to which it hardly dared to raise its eyes. It was this sort of love that raised a man above himself and above his past. Again a question insinuated itself into her mind. Had it been given in her own case? But again there was no time to answer it.

There was no time, indeed, for more conversation. A hulloa and a bustle at the further edge of the wood from which they had come showed it to have contained a prize after all. The stream set that way, and they followed it with the hope of making up for the ground they had lost.

For a time they galloped together, and then there came a fence which Bertie took easily enough, but which to Beatrix was somewhat of an ordeal. She went at it, but her mare, having her own ideas as to how much should be asked of her, refused; and at the beginning of the day, with her blood not yet warmed, Beatrix did not put her at it again. There was a gate a few yards off which had already been opened, and she went through it with others. In the meantime Bertie, to whom it had not occurred that she would not take a fence that any of his sisters would have larked over without thinking about it, had got on well ahead of her, and she did not see him again.

But although their conversation had been cut short, all, probably, had been said that he could have expected to be said. Beatrix thought that there was little doubt now of his proposing to Mollie, and perhaps as soon as he should find an opportunity.

Beatrix, of all three of the girls, was the least interested in hunting. When she realised that the day had opened with a good straight run, and that her bad start had left her hopelessly behind, she gave it up, and was quite content to do so. A little piece of original thinking on her part had led her to take a different line from that followed by most of those who had started late with her, but it had not given her the advantage she had hoped from it. Presently she found herself quite alone, in a country of wide grass fields and willow-bordered brooks which was actually the pick of the South Meadshire country, if only the fox had been accommodating enough to take to it.

Recognising, after a time, that she was hopelessly lost, and being even without the country lore that would have given her direction by the softly blowing west wind, she gave it up with a laugh and decided to return slowly home. She would anyhow have had a nice long ride, and the feminine spirit in her turned gratefully towards a cosy afternoon indoors with a book, which would be none the less pleasant because it had hardly been earned.

She followed tracks across the fields until she came to a lane and then to a road, followed that till she found crossroads and a signpost, and then discovered that she was going in the opposite direction to that of Abington. So she turned back about a mile, and going a little farther found herself in familiar country and reached home in time for a bath before luncheon.

That was Beatrix's day with the hounds, but she had plenty to think about as she walked and trotted along the quiet lanes.

She felt rather soft with regard to Bertie and Mollie. He had shown himself in a light that touched her, and the conviction, which at one period of their conversation she had quite sincerely expressed to him, that he was not nearly good enough for her chosen friend, she found herself to have relinquished. As the young man with some reputation for love-making, who had seemed to be uncertain whether he would or he wouldn't, he had certainly not been good enough, nor on that side of him would he ever be good enough. But there had been something revealed that went a good deal deeper than that. Beatrix thought that his love for Mollie was after all of the right sort, and was honouring to her friend. She also thought that she herself might perhaps do something to further it.

As for Mollie, she had found herself somewhat impressed by the young man's statement that she had given him little encouragement. She had seen for herself, watching the pair of them when they had been together, how she had been invited to it. Here again her own experience that had been so sweet to her came in. The man shows himself attracted. He makes little appeals and advances. An aura begins to form round him; he is not as other men. But the girl shrinks instinctively from those advances at first, holding her maiden stronghold. Then, as instinctively, she begins to invite them, and greatly daring makes some fluttering return, to be followed perhaps by a more determined closing up. The round repeats itself, and she is led always further along the path that she half fears to tread, until at last she is taken by storm, and then treads it with no fear at all, but with complete capitulation and high joy.

So it had been with her, and she thought that it should have been so with Mollie, until the tiresome figure of the Vicar, spoiling the delicate poise with his crude accusations, presented itself to her. It was that that had made Mollie so careful that she had shut herself off in irresponsiveness, wary and intended, instead of following the fresh pure impulses of her girlhood. She was sure of it, and half wished she had said as much to Bertie, but on consideration was glad that she hadn't. He would have been very angry, and awkwardness might have come of it, for those who were forced to live in proximity to this official upholder of righteousness. He would be sufficiently confounded when what he had shown himself so eager to spoil in the making should result in happiness and accord. If Beatrix, in her loyalty towards youth as against interfering middle-age, also looked forward with pleasure to exhibitions of annoyance at the defeat that was coming to him, she may perhaps be forgiven.

It may be supposed, however, that during that long slow ride home her thoughts were more taken up with her own affair than with that of her friends, which indeed seemed in train to be happily settled in a way that hers was not.

For the first time in all these months, she examined it from a standpoint a little outside herself. She did not know that she was enabled to do this by the fact that her devotion to Lassigny's memory had begun to loosen its hold on her. Her time of love-making had been so short, and her knowledge of her lover so slight, that it was now the memory to which she clung, and was obliged to cling if her love was not to die down altogether. None of this, however, would she have admitted. She had given her love, and in her own view of it she had given it for life.

What she found herself able to examine, in the light of Bertie Pemberton's revelation of himself, was the figure of her own lover, not altogether deprived of the halo with which she had crowned it, but for the first time somewhat as others might see it, and especially her father.

He distrusted Lassigny. Why? She had never admitted the question before, and only did so now on the first breath of discomfort that blew chill on her own heart. Those two sorts of love of which Mollie's lover had dimly seen his own to be compounded—had they both been offered to her? There had been no such shrinking on Lassigny's part as the more ordinary young man had confessed to. He had wooed her boldly, irresistibly, with the sure confidence of a man who knows his power, and what he may expect to get for himself from it. He had desired her, and she had fallen a willing captive to him. She knew that he had found her very sweet, and he had laid at her feet so much that she had never questioned his having laid all. All would have included his own man's past, the full tide of the years and experiences of youth, spent lavishly while she had been a little child, and beginning now to poise its wings for departure. It was the careless waste of youth and of love that Mollie's lover had felt to have been disloyalty to the finer love that had come to him, and turned him from his loud self-confidence to diffidence and doubt. There had been no self-abasement of that sort in Beatrix's lover. He had claimed her triumphantly, as he had claimed and enjoyed other loves. She was one of a series, different from the others insomuch as the time had come for him to settle down, as the phrase went, and it was more agreeable to make a start at that postponed process with love as part of the propulsion than without it. It was not even certain that she would be the last of the series. In her father's view it was almost certain that she wouldn't.

She did not see all of this, by any means, as she rode reflectively homewards. Her knowledge and experience included perhaps a very small part of it as conscious reflection, and there was no ordered sequence of thought or discovery in the workings of her girl's mind. Some progression, however, there was, in little spurts of feeling and enlightenment. She was more doubtful of her lover, more doubtful of the strength of her own attachment to him, more inclined to return to her loving allegiance to her father, whatever the future should hold for her.

This last impulse of affection was the most significant outcome of all her aroused sensibilities. She would not at any time have acknowledged that he had been right and she had been wrong. But she felt the channel of her love for him cleared of obstruction. It flowed towards him. It would be good to give it expression, and gain in return the old happy signs of his tenderness and devotion towards her. She wanted to see him at once, and behave to him as his spoilt loving child, and rather hoped that the fortunes of the chase would bring him home before the rest, so that she might have a cosy companionable little time with him alone.

In the afternoon, as the short winter day began to draw in, having read and lightly slept, her young blood roused her to activity again. She would go and see Mollie, and persuade her to come back to tea with her, so that they could talk confidentially together. Or if she had to stay to tea at Stone Cottage, because of Mrs. Walter, perhaps Mollie would come back with her afterwards.

She put on her coat and hat, and went out as the dusk was falling over the quiet spaces of the park. As she neared the gates she heard the trot of a horse on the road outside, and wondered if it was her father who was coming home. She had forgotten her wish that he would do so, as it had seemed so little likely of fulfilment, but made up her mind to go back with him if it should happily be he.

It was a man, who passed the gates at a sharp trot, not turning his head to look inside them. The light was not too far gone for her to recognise, with a start of surprise, the horsemanlike figure of Bertie Pemberton, whom she had imagined many miles away. The hunt had set directly away from Abington, and was not likely to have worked back so far in this direction. Nor could Abington conceivably be on Bertie's homeward road, even supposing him so far to have departed from his usual habits as to have taken it before the end of the day. What was he doing here?

She thought she knew, and walked on down the road to the village at a slightly faster pace, with a keen sense of pleasure and excitement at her breast. She saw him come out of the stable of the inn, on foot, and walk up the village street at the head of which stood Stone Cottage, at a pace faster than her own.

Then she turned and went back, smiling to herself, but a little melancholy too. She was not so happy as Mollie was likely to be in a very short time.