hand with a tremendous plunge, and in half a dozen bounds was out of the
yard gate and clattering down the road.

There was an instant of petrifaction. "Diddlety--iddlety--idlety!"
chanted the waiter with far-away sweetness.

Fanny Fitz and the ostler were outside the gate simultaneously: the
filly was already rounding the first turn of the road; two strides more,
and she was gone as though she had never been, and "Oh, my nineteen
pounds!" thought poor Fanny Fitz.

As the ostler was wont to say in subsequent repetitions of the story:
"Thanks be to God, the reins was rotten!" But for this it is highly
probable that Miss Fitzroy's speculation would have collapsed abruptly
with broken knees, possibly with a broken neck. Having galloped into
them in the course of the first hundred yards, they fell from her as
the green withes fell from Samson, one long streamer alone remaining to
lash her flanks as she fled. Some five miles from the hotel she met a
wedding, and therewith leaped the bog-drain by the side of the road and
"took to the mountains," as the bridegroom poetically described it to
Fanny Fitz, who, with the ostler, was pursuing the fugitive on an
outside car.

"If that's the way," said the ostler, "ye mightn't get her again before
the winther."

Fanny Fitz left the matter, together with a further instalment of the
thirty pounds, in the hands of the sergeant of police, and went home,
and, improbable as it may appear, in the course of something less than
ten days she received an invoice from the local railway station,