He felt in that second that it had been a piece of pure madness to have wished that all this had happened before yesterday’s “yellow bracken.”

She glanced up at him with a quick, searching look. Then she tightened her cloak resolutely round her. “It’s in the Lovelace stables,” she said. “I can easily find it. You needn’t come.”

“Of course I’ll come! I’ll go with you and put you on it; and then I’ll come back for my mother.”

“It’s pity I feel,” he said to himself. “I’ve got Gerda for good and all. It’s just pity I feel.”