'Felix,' said his cousin, 'take your cigar a little farther. You are filling the house with tobacco.'
'Oh heavens,--what a prejudice!' said the baronet.
'Let it be so, but still do as I ask you.' Sir Felix chucked the cigar out of his mouth on to the gravel walk, whereupon Roger walked up to the spot and kicked the offending weed away. This was the first greeting of the day between the two men.
After lunch Lady Carbury strolled about with her son, instigating him to go over at once to Caversham. 'How the deuce am I to get there?'
'Your cousin will lend you a horse.'
'He's as cross as a bear with a sore head. He's a deal older than I am, and a cousin and all that, but I'm not going to put up with insolence. If it were anywhere else I should just go into the yard and ask if I could have a horse and saddle as a matter of course.'
'Roger has not a great establishment.'
'I suppose he has a horse and saddle, and a man to get it ready. I don't want anything grand.'
'He is vexed because he sent twice to the station for you yesterday.'
'I hate the kind of fellow who is always thinking of little grievances. Such a man expects you to go like clockwork, and because you are not wound up just as he is, he insults you. I shall ask him for a horse as I would any one else, and if he does not like it, he may lump it.' About half an hour after this he found his cousin. 'Can I have a horse to ride over to Caversham this afternoon?' he said.
'Our horses never go out on Sunday,' said Roger. Then he added, after a pause, 'You can have it. I'll give the order.' Sir Felix would be gone on Tuesday, and it should be his own fault if that odious cousin ever found his way into Carbury House again! So he declared to himself as Felix rode out of the yard; but he soon remembered how probable it was that Felix himself would be the owner of Carbury. And should it ever come to pass,--as still was possible,--that Henrietta should be the mistress of Carbury, he could hardly forbid her to receive her brother. He stood for a while on the bridge watching his cousin as he cantered away upon the road, listening to the horse's feet. The young man was offensive in every possible way. Who does not know that ladies only are allowed to canter their friends' horses upon roads? A gentleman trots his horse, and his friend's horse. Roger Carbury had but one saddle horse,--a favourite old hunter that he loved as a friend. And now this dear old friend, whose legs probably were not quite so good as they once were, was being galloped along the hard road by that odious cub! 'Soda and brandy!' Roger exclaimed to himself almost aloud, thinking of the discomfiture of that early morning. 'He'll die some day of delirium tremens in a hospital!'