CHAPTER THREE
AMUSING THE GUESTSWhen the ladies had reached the yellow drawing-room, Alice was joined by Sally Wicklow, full of the delightful time she had had at dinner. She had, it appeared, been seated between an M.F.H. in whose country she had once hunted and a man in the diplomatic. The M.F.H. had been so struck by her account of how she had helped a young mare who had been frightened by a motor-lorry to recover her nerve that he had offered to mount her whenever she liked, an offer that Sally, who had only one horse, had at once accepted, naming the day when she would first like to go out. Flushed with this success she had turned to her neighbour, who said he had heard her talking about horses, and did she know anything about dogs. He had, he said, brought back from the Near East a
