"You have to get ready," she pointed out, "and you'll do it
quicker if I'm not here. Besides, I can't wait."

They all went out with her to the gate, where her superb, high-tempered
horse pawed the gravel, and champed upon his bit. Jim sent her
springing to the saddle from his horny palm like a bird let out of it,
and they watched in silence while she crossed two paddocks, leaped two
sets of slip-rails, and disappeared as a small dot of white
handkerchief from the sun-suffused landscape.

"What riding!" Guthrie Carey ejaculated, under his breath.

"She's the best horsewoman in the country," Jim Urquhart commented
slowly, after a still pause.

He was a slow--to some people a dull and heavy--man, who talked
little, and less of Deborah Pennycuick than of any subject in the world
--his world.

"And what a howling beauty!" the sailor added, in the same whisper of
awe.

Again the bushman spoke, muttering deeply in his beard: "She is as good
as she is beautiful."

Mrs Urquhart took her levelled hand from her eyes, and turned to
contribute her testimony.

"There, Mr Carey, goes the flower of the Western District. You won't