Pheasant interrupted: "How did I do?"
No answer came for a moment, then he growled: "Not so badly. But you needn't have touched The Soldier. Much better not."
"Well, I came second, anyway."
"Might have come first if you hadn't. Lord, if ever I get this cursed old bus home!"
Pheasant's voice was indignant. "Look at that American girl's horse! It was a perfect peach!"
"So is The Soldier," muttered her brother-in-law, stubbornly.
Finch reclined in a corner of the car, in a state of depression. The enveloping, dank blackness of the premature night, the thought of the hours of study in his cold bedroom that lay before him, seemed like hands reaching up out of the sodden ground, dragging him down. He was famishing. He had a piece of chocolate bar in his pocket, and he wondered if he could extract it and negotiate its passage to his mouth without Pheasant's becoming aware of it. He felt for it, found it, cautiously extricated it from its battered silver-paper wrapping under cover of a sudden fierce outburst from Renny which distracted her attention. He crammed it into his mouth, sinking lower into the seat and closing his eyes.
He was beginning to feel comforted when Pheasant hissed in his ear: "Horrid little pig!"
He had forgotten how shrewd was her sense of smell. She was going to get even, too. She fumbled in her pocket, produced a cigarette-case, and the next instant the sharp flare of a match lighted up her little pale face and showed the sarcastic pucker of her lips cherishing the cigarette. Sweet-smelling smoke lay heavy on the damp air. Finch's last cigarette had been smoked that noonday. He might, of course, have asked Renny for one, but it was scarcely safe to approach him when he was baffled by the car.
Presently the eldest Whiteoak threw himself back in his seat with a gesture of despair.
"We may walk home for all of her," he observed, laconically. He too lighted a cigarette.
