“I am worried about uncle,” she said in a low tone.
“Is he ill?” asked Horace.
She shook her head.
“No, it isn’t his illness—yet it may be. But he is so contradictory; I am so afraid that it might react to our disadvantage. You know how willing he was that you should …”
She hesitated, and his hand sought hers under the cover of an open newspaper.
“It was marvellous,” he whispered, “wasn’t it? I never expected for one moment that the old dev—that your dear uncle,” he corrected himself, “would have been so amenable.”
She nodded again.
“You see,” she said, taking advantage of another heated passage between the old man and the irritated baronet, “what he does so impetuously he can undo just as easily. I am so afraid he will turn and rend you.”
“Let him try,” said Horace. “I am not easily rent.”
Their conversation was cut short abruptly by the intervention of the man they were discussing.
“Look here, Gresham,” snapped the earl shortly, “you’re one of the cognoscenti, and I suppose you know everything. Who are the ‘Four Just Men’ I hear people talking about?”
Horace was conscious of the fact that the eyes of Sir Isaac Tramber were fixed on him curiously. He was a man who made no disguise of his suspicion.
“I know no more than you,” said Horace. “They seem to me to be an admirable body of people who go about correcting social evils.”
“Who are they to judge what is and what is not evil?” growled the earl, scowling from under his heavy eyebrows. “Infernal cheek! What do we pay judges and jurymen and coroners and policemen and people of that sort for, eh? What do we pay taxes for, and rent for, and police rates, and gas rates, and water rates, and every kind of dam’ rate that the devilish ingenuity of man can devise? Do we do it that these jackanapes can come along and interfere with the course of justice? It’s absurd! It’s ridiculous!” he stormed.
Horace threw out a protesting hand.
“Don’t blame me,” he said.
“But you approve of them,” accused the earl. “Ikey says you do, and Ikey knows everything—don’t you, Ikey?”
Sir Isaac shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“I didn’t say Gresham knew anything about it,” he began lamely.
“Why do you lie, Ikey; why do you lie?” asked the old man testily. “You just told me that you were perfectly sure that Gresham was one of the leading spirits of the gang.”
Sir Isaac, inured as he was to the brutal indiscretions of his friends, went a dull red.
“Oh, I didn’t mean that exactly,” he said awkwardly and a little angrily. “Dash it, Lord Verlond, don’t embarrass a fellow by rendering him liable to heavy damages an all that sort of thing.”
Horace was unperturbed by the other’s confusion.
“You needn’t bother yourself,” he said coolly. “I should never think of taking you to a court of justice.”
He turned again to the girl, and the earl claimed the baronet’s attention. The old man had a trick of striking off at a tangent; from one subject to another he leapt like a will-o’-the-wisp. Before Horace had framed half a dozen words the old man was dragging his unwilling victim along a piscatorial road, and Sir Isaac was floundering out of his depths in a morass—if the metaphor be excused—of salmon-fishing, trout-poaching, pike-fishing—a sport on which Sir Isaac Tramber could by no means deem himself an authority.
It was soon after lunch that the train pulled into Lincoln. Horace usually rented a house outside the town, but this year he had arranged to go and return to London on the same night. At the station he parted with the girl.
“I shall see you on the course,” he said. “What are your arrangements? Do you go back to town tonight?”
She nodded.
“Is this a very important race for you to win?” she asked, a little anxiously.
He shook his head.
“Nobody really bothers overmuch about the Lincolnshire Handicap,” he said. “You see, it’s too early in the season for even the gamblers to put their money down with any assurance. One doesn’t know much, and it is almost impossible to tell what horses are in form. I verily believe that Nemesis will win but everything is against her.
“You see, the Lincoln,” continued Horace doubtfully, “is a race which is not usually won by a filly, and then, too, she is a sprinter. I know sprinters have won the race before, and every year have been confidently expected to win it again; but the averages are all against a horse like Nemesis.”
“But I thought,” she said in wonder, “that you were so confident about her.”
He laughed a little.
“Well, you know, one is awfully confident on Monday and full of doubts on Tuesday. That is part of the game; the form of horses is not half as inconsistent as the form of owners. I shall probably meet a man this morning who will tell me that some horse is an absolute certainty for the last race of the day. He will hold me by the buttonhole and he will drum into me the fact that this is the most extraordinarily easy method of picking up money that was ever invented since racing started. When I meet him after the last race he will coolly inform me that he did not back that horse, but had some tip at the last moment from an obscure individual who knew the owner’s aunt’s sister. You mustn’t expect one to be consistent.
“I still think Nemesis will win,” he went on, “but I am not so confident as I was. The most cocksure of students gets a little glum in the face of the examiner.”
The earl had joined them and was listening to the conversation with a certain amount of grim amusement.
“Ikey is certain Timbolino will win,” he said, “even in the face of the examiner. Somebody has just told me that the examiner is rather soft under foot.”
“You mean the course?” asked Horace, a little anxiously.
The earl nodded.
“It
