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does!”
    Â Â Â Â  “I don’t see why . . .” said Meredith, still hunting for the page. “You’ve got to be lively to mate. Vital or something. Cod liver oil gives vitality. I read it . . . it’s here . . . ‘gives vitality to the mating bird.’ ”
    Â Â Â Â  “Miss Ada’ll step on your hand if you leave it there,” said Velvet.
    Â Â Â Â  Meredith got slowly up, reading as she rose. “It doesn’t say whether it’s the cock bird or the hen. Which do you think it is, Mi?”
    Â Â Â Â  “Cock before, hen after,” said Mi.
    Â Â Â Â  “There you are!” said Meredith. “I
wish
mother’d let me order it.”
    Â Â Â Â  “You got it all over the sofa last time.”
    Â Â Â Â  “But I’ve got a fountain pen filler now. I’ve trained the cock on drops of water. He’s as good as gold. The hen makes a fuss. I could do her in the yard.”
    Â Â Â Â  “Bed,” said Edwina from the darkness outside.
    Â Â Â Â  They filed out without a word, Meredith reading to the last by the flare of the hurricane lamp. The spring gale had gone. The spring sky was indefinite and still, with a star in it. There was a new moon.
    Â Â Â Â  “Are you coming, Velvet?”
    Â Â Â Â  “You can’t leave Miss Ada with nothing when we’ve used her stable. I’ll be a second.” She opened the corn bin and Miss Ada dropped ten years off her looks. She plunged her nose on the two hands that cupped the corn and ducked her head to sniff out the droppings before they sank too far in the straw. Velvet, alone, saw the new moon. She bowed three times, glanced round to see that no one saw, then standing in the shadow of the stable door she put her hands like thin white arrows together and prayed to the moon—“Oh, God, give me horses, give me horses! Let me be the best rider in England!”

CHAPTER II
    T HE next morning Meredith had to take some suet and a shin of beef over to Pendean. School was at nine. It was the last day of term. She rose at six. Mi called her on his way downstairs. He heated the coffee left over from last night and gave her three sardines between two pieces of bread. Then Meredith went out to saddle Miss Ada.
    Â Â Â Â  Miss Ada had a crupper to her saddle, partly because the hills were so steep and partly because she had no shoulders. Meredith forgot the crupper and left it dangling. She put the girths on twisted, put the
Canary Breeder
in the basket with the suet, and started off. Miss Ada tapped smartly up the village street on the tarmac. The flints on the church shone like looking-glass. Meredith trotted east into the rising sun. Her toes were warm and the sardines and the bread and coffee digested comfortingly. Over the Hullocks and down into the valleys, sun and shadow, cup and saucer, through the tarred gate, the wired gate, the broken gate, and finally into the Pendean valley and to the house.She gave in the beef and the suet, would have stopped to talk to Lucy the farm daughter (only Lucy had a temperature), started on the home journey, crupper still dangling, and Miss Ada restive now from the sore of the twisted girth.
    Â Â Â Â  “We’ll go the Dead-Horse-Patch way,” said Meredith suddenly, aloud; and then disliked the sound of the spoken words in the lonely landscape. One of Miss Ada’s ears came forward. They were above the village now, though still two miles away. There were two ways down to the sea level. One by the two steep fields and the chalk road whence she had come up, the other by two more steep fields, two gates, a broken reaping machine, a cabbage field, to a haystack—and a place where a horse had once dropped dead.
    Â Â Â Â  For thirteen years Miss Ada had said that place was haunted. She had told Mr. Brown so plainly when Velvet was crawling. And he