"Course he is, sir; nobody ever laid leg over such cattle as all that
White Cockade blood, and he's the very best of the strain," said Rake,
as he held up his lantern across the stable-yard, that looked doubly
dark in the February night after the bright gas glare of the box.

"So he need be," thought Cecil, as a bull terrier, three or four Gordon
setters, an Alpine mastiff, and two wiry Skyes dashed at their chains,
giving tongue in frantic delight at the sound of his step, while the
hounds echoed the welcome from their more distant kennels, and he went
slowly across the great stone yard, with the end of a huge cheroot
glimmering through the gloom. "So he need be, to pull me through. The
Ducal and the October let me in for it enough; I never was closer in
my life. The deuce! If I don't do the distance to-morrow I shan't have
sovereigns enough to play pound-points at night! I don't know what a
man's to do; if he's put into this life, he must go the pace of it. Why
did Royal send me into the Guards, if he meant to keep the screw on in
this way? He'd better have drafted me into a marching regiment at once,
if he wanted me to live upon nothing."

Nothing meant anything under 60,000 pounds a year with Cecil, as the
minimum of monetary necessities in this world, and a look of genuine
annoyance and trouble, most unusual there, was on his face, the picture
of carelessness and gentle indifference habitually, though shadowed
now as he crossed the courtyard after his after-midnight visit to his
steeple-chaser. He had backed Forest King heavily, and stood to win or
lose a cracker on his own riding on the morrow; and, though he had found
sufficient to bring him into the Shires, he had barely enough lying on
his dressing-table, up in the bachelor suite within, to pay his groom's
book, or a notion where to get more, if the King should find his match
over the ridge and furrow in the morning!