“What do they think about lynching in the north?”

“They squeal a bit, but they’ve no call to. If we’ve got negroes, they’ve got the Reds, and they surely have a wholesale way with them.”

Jon Forsyte tilted back his rocking-chair, with a puzzled frown.

“I reckon there’s too much space left in this country,” said Francis Wilmot; “a man has all the chances to get off. So where we feel strong about a thing, we take the law into our own hands.”

“Well, every country to its own fashions. What are these mounds we’re going to?”

“Old Indian remains that go way back thousands of years, they say. You haven’t met my sister? She only came last night.”

“No. What time do we start?”

“Noon; it’s about an hour’s ride by the woods.”

At noon then, in riding kit, Jon came out to the five horses, for more than one of the Blair girls had elected to ride. He started between them, Francis Wilmot going ahead with his sister.

The Blair girls were young and pretty with a medium-coloured, short-faced, well-complexioned, American prettiness, of a type to which he had become accustomed during the two and a half years he had spent in the United States. They were at first extremely silent, and then extremely vocal. They rode astride, and very well. Jon learned that they, as well as the givers of the picnic, Mr. and Mrs. Pulmore Hurrison, inhabited Long Island. They asked him many questions about England, to which Jon, who had left it at the age of nineteen, invented many answers. He began to look longingly between his horse’s ears at Francis Wilmot and his sister, cantering ahead in a silence that, from a distance, seemed extremely restful. Their way led through pine woods—of trees spindly and sparse, and over a rather sandy soil; the sunlight was clear and warm, the air still crisp. Jon rode a single-footing bay horse, and felt as one feels on the first day of recovered health.

The Blair girls wished to know what he thought of the English novelist—they were dying to see a real highbrow. Jon had only read one of his books, and of the characters therein could only remember a cat. The Blair girls had read none; but they had heard that his cats were “just too cunning.”