Peggy was beginning to experience something of her father's unrest.

October came. Her work with Dr. Llewellyn was resumed. Each Sunday she
drove into Annapolis to old St. Ann's with Harrison; a modest,
unobtrusive little figure who attended the service and slipped away
again almost unnoticed. Indeed, if given a thought at all she was
vaguely supposed to be some connection of the eminently respectable
elderly woman accompanying her. Harrison was a rather stately imposing
body in her black taffeta, or black broadcloth, as the season demanded.
People did not inquire. It was not their affair. The rector on one or
two occasions had spoken to Harrison, but Harrison had been on her
dignity. She replied politely but did not encourage intimacy and, if the
truth must be confessed, Dr. Smith, rather piqued, decided that he had
done his duty and would make no further advances. This had happened some
time before the beginning of this story.

In October, as usual, a number of colts were disposed of. Some were sold
to people in the adjacent towns or counties, others sent to remote
purchasers who had seen them in their baby days, followed their up-
bringing and training, and waited patiently for them to arrive at the
stipulated age, four years, before becoming their property. No colt was
ever sold under four years of age. This was an inviolable law of
Severndale, mutually agreed upon by Dr. Llewellyn, the business manager,
Shelby, the foreman, and Peggy, the mistress.

"Ain't going to have no half-baked stock sent off THIS place if I have
the say-so," had been Shelby's fiat. "I've seen too many fine colts
mined by being BRUCK too young and then sold to fools who don't seem to
sense that a horse's backbone's like gristle 'fore he's turned three.
Then they load him down fit to kill him, or harness him in a way no