"Ha, you blundering idiot!" exclaimed the elder of the two men, pulling up his horse, a powerful roan, as he stumbled at the beginning of the descent. He was a big, heavy man with a red face, thick gray mustache, and small, angry-looking eyes. "He'll break my neck some day."
"Don't take away his character," returned his companion, laughing. "Remember he has had a hard run, and you are not a feather-weight." The speaker was tall (judging from the length of the well-shaped leg which lay close against his horse's side), large-framed, and bony; his plain strong face was tanned to swarthiness by exposure to wind and weather; moreover, a pair of deep-set dark eyes and long, nearly black mustache showed that he had been no fair, ruddy youth to begin with.
"No, by Jove!" exclaimed the first speaker. "I don't understand how it is that I grow so infernally stout. I am sure I take exercise enough, and live most temperately."
"Exercise! Yes, for five or six months; the rest of the twelve you do nothing. And as to living temperately, what with a solid breakfast, a heavy luncheon, and a serious dinner, you manage to consume a great deal in the twenty-four hours."
"Come, De Burgh! Hang it, I rarely eat lunch."
"Only when you can get it. Say two hundred and ninety times out of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year."
"I admit nothing of the sort. The fact is, what I eat goes into a good skin. Now you might _cram_ the year round and be a bag of bones at the end of it."
"Thank God for all his mercies," replied De Burgh. "The fact is, you are a spoiled favorite of fortune, and in addition to all the good things you have inherited you pick up a charming wife who spoils you and coddles you in a way to make the mouth of an unfortunate devil like myself water with envy."
"None of that nonsense, De Burgh," complacently. "The heart of a benedict knoweth its own bitterness, though I can't complain much. If you hadn't been the reckless _roue_ you are, you might have been as well off as myself."
De Burgh laughed. "You see, I never cared for domestic bliss. I hate fetters of every description, and I lay the ruin of my morals to the score of that immortal old relative of mine who persists in keeping me out of my heritage. The conviction that you are always sure of an estate, and possibly thirty thousand a year, has a terrible effect on one's character."