Will had long since disappeared from her ken, but when she came to the long roofed place, open at the side, where beribboned and straw-plaited hacks and draught-horses were tied to their staples, there he was, chained just as firmly by a sort of sentinel stubbornness. It was as if he was saying “Through my body first!” The thrill his proximity gave her was shot through with a renewed resentment against this obviously undiminished opposition of his. But she was resolved to meet him with banter rather than with anger.

“You buying horses?” she said genially.

“No, I am not buying horses!” he answered roughly. “But aren’t you ashamed to be here—the only one of your sex?”

“Surely not!” said Jinny. “Where’s your eyes?”

He looked round, wonderingly.

“Under your nose!” guided Jinny. “There, isn’t that a mare? And I passed sows and ewes and heifers by the score.”

“And that’s what you class yourself with? And then you deny you are lowering yourself!”

“I always lower myself when I get off my cart.”

“Well, you get up again! That’s the best advice I can give you. Drive home!”

“And shirk my job!”

“I’ll do your job.”

“You! I thought you were not buying horses.”

“You know what I mean. How much does old Flippance want to give?”

“Oh, he’s not so old,” she said evasively. She was scanning the horses with troubled eye, perturbed even more than by her own affairs by the thought of the innumerable diseases and defects and doctorings which might be lurking beneath their sheen of health and vigour. Her innocent faith undermined by literature and Mr. Flippance’s experience, she had a cynical sense of horsey hypocrisy, of whited, blacked, or browned sepulchres, within which fearsome worms burrowed in their millions. She would have gladly consulted Will, had he not been so tactlessly intrusive. Even as it was, she murmured encouragingly: “There doesn’t seem much choice to-day.” Indeed, the animals were mostly huge shire horses with their heavily feathered fetlocks. Of hackneys there were only two or three.

“I should take that Suffolk Punch,” advised Will, indicating a chestnut. “He’ll have the strength to draw the caravan, and doesn’t look so clumsy and hairy-legged as the others.”

“I like the star on his forehead,” said Jinny. “But I can’t bear a cropped tail, it’s cruel. Besides, Mr. Flippance hasn’t got a caravan.”

“Well, how does he carry all that truck I saw?”

“Oh, that goes in wagons with horses just hired from town to town. They don’t even live in a caravan like Mr. Duke’s got. No, but they have a trap that they drive over in, ahead, and then Mr. Flippance uses the trap to look for a pitch to hire, or to bring home naphtha for the lamps or timber for mending the theatre—something always goes wrong, he says.”

“Then I’d have the Cleveland?”

“Which is the Cleveland?”

“That tall bay with black points and clean legs. I’ve hardly ever seen one at an Essex fair, but they’re strong as plough-horses and handsome as hackneys.”

“But don’t you think that couple there are handsomer?”

“The black—of course! They’re a pair of real carriage horses. Splendid action, I reckon. But Mr. Flippance won’t want anything so showy as that.”

“Just what a show does want,” laughed Jinny. “You see he also rides about the town, blowing on the horn and scattering handbills.”

“I didn’t understand that. And can he blow a horn as well?”

“As well as who?”

“As me!” said Will boldly. “And when am I to have my gloves?” He sought her hand in the press and it was not withdrawn.

“When you go blowing it for Mr. Flippance in his next town,” she laughed happily.

“Then I must choose the horse I blow behind,” he said with an air of lightness. “What’s the most old Flippance will go to?”

“Thirty pounds is his last word, I’m afraid.”

“Much too little. But we’ll see. Now I’ll take you back to your cart.”

“What for?” Her hand unclasped. “I’ve got to buy the horse, I must wait here.”

“But they’ll be taken in there.” He pointed to the cattle auction-chamber. “And there’s no need for you to bid personally.”

“I shall enjoy bidding.”

“Among all those men? You won’t even get a look in.”

The chamber was indeed besieged by a seething crowd, some standing on tiptoe, astrain to get their bids marked.

“I’ll borrow one of those pig-dealers’ stools,” she said.

“Do be serious, Jinny.”

“And do you suppose my work is a joke?”

“But you can’t squeeze in that crowd? Suppose we find out the owner and get one of the black horses by private treaty?”

“And pay the market fee? Not me! Besides, he’ll want a top price and there’s more fun and chances in bidding. Oh look! that poor Cleveland’s got himself all tangled up! Do help him!”

It was not easy to release the animal which, having encoiled its legs in the rope attached to its staple, was getting more and more frightened as its own efforts lassoed it the tighter. Jinny’s heart beat fast lest Will should get kicked, and still faster at the nonchalance with which he accomplished his dangerous task.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly, when the animal stood shaking, but quiet.

“It’s not your horse.”

“But I asked you to do it.”

“Then you might do what I ask you?” he retorted.

She frowned. She did not like this tricky tit-for-tat. It was unchivalrous. It undid his deed of derring-do.

“You must not interfere with my business,” she said severely, and swept to the nearest door.

“Jinny! Where are you going?” He had followed her.

“To the bar!” she said solemnly, perceiving the nature of the forbidden chamber. “Why can’t I have a drink and a smoke? What will you take?”

He gasped, believing her serious. So female smoking even in public was no impossible foreboding. To this buffet, blockaded by laughing, swilling, tobacco-clouded masculinity, mitigated only—if not indeed aggravated—by a barmaid, Jinny was actually going to wriggle her way! And the buffet did not even sell milk!

“You shan’t go,” he said in a low hoarse tone, clutching at her arm. “By God, you shan’t!”

But he succeeded only in grasping her dangling horn, and, in her dart forward, it was left in his hand. “I didn’t ask you to ‘take’ that!” she laughed back as she crossed the threshold. “I meant, what’s your drink?”

“Jinny!” he breathed, his voice frozen.

“Mine’s ink!” she called out gaily, and the males, now aware of her presence, vied with one another to pass the bottle and pen on the counter to her, together with the little bowl of sand, all of which she bore to the quiet side of the room, where a protracted desk supplied facilities for notes and accounts. Reassured, but still resentful, Will stood at the door, awkwardly holding her horn with its bit of broken girdle, and watching her protectively as she scribbled on a piece of paper, and blotted it with the sand. Then coming back to him, she took away her horn—not without a reproachful glance at the snapped cord—and putting her folded paper into his hand instead, glided past him and was lost in the hurly-burly.

Disconsolate, yet excited, he opened the note, and read this wholly unexpected quatrain:

Swearing