"she laid down to her work." Nothing in the immutable
iron of Lapham's face betrayed his sense of triumph
as the mare left everything behind her on the road.
Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her
flying wraps about her, and shielding her face from the
scud of ice flung from the mare's heels, to betray it;
except for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent
as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and
thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism
responding to an alien force, and she shot to the end
of the course, grazing a hundred encountered and rival
sledges in her passage, but unmolested by the policemen,
who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew
what they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort
of men to interfere with trotting like that. At the end
of the heat Lapham drew her in, and turned off on a side
street into Brookline.

"Tell you what, Pert," he said, as if they had been quietly
jogging along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he
last spoke, "I've about made up my mind to build on that lot."

"All right, Silas," said Mrs. Lapham; "I suppose you
know what you're about. Don't build on it for me,
that's all."

When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things,
she said to the girls, who were helping her, "Some day
your father will get killed with that mare."