I congratulate you most heartily, most sincerely." And he meant it, too.

Jimmy never canted, nor did he ever throw the blame, with paltry, savage vindictiveness, on the horse he had ridden.
Some men there are--their name is legion--who never allow that it is their fault when they are "nowhere"-- oh, no! it is the "cursed screw" always, according to them.

But a very good rider will not tell you that.
Cecil, while he talked, was glancing up at the Grand Stand, and when the others dispersed to look over the horses, and he had put himself out of his shell into his sealskin in the dressing-shed, he went up thither without a moment's loss of time.
He knew them all; those dainty beauties with their delicate cheeks just brightened by the western winterly wind, and their rich furs and laces glowing among the colors of their respective heroes; he was the pet of them all; "Beauty" had the suffrages of the sex without exception; he was received with bright smiles and graceful congratulations, even from those who had espoused Eyre Montacute's cause, and still fluttered their losing azure, though the poor hunter lay dead, with his back broken, and a pistol-ball mercifully sent through his brains--the martyr to a man's hot haste, as the dumb things have ever been since creation began.
Cecil passed them as rapidly as he could for one so well received by them, and made his way to the center of the Stand, to the same spot at which he had glanced when he had drunk the Moselle.
A lady turned to him; she looked like a rose camellia in her floating scarlet and white, just toned down and made perfect by a shower of Spanish lace; a beautiful brunette, dashing, yet delicate; a little fast, yet intensely thoroughbred; a coquette who would smoke a cigarette, yet a peeress who would never lose her dignity.
"Au coeur vaillant rien d'impossible!" she said, with an envoi of her lorgnon, and a smile that should have intoxicated him--a smile that might have rewarded a Richepanse for a Hohenlinden.

"Superbly ridden! I absolutely trembled for you as you lifted the King to that last leap.

It was terrible!" It was terrible; and a woman, to say nothing of a woman who was in love with him, might well have felt a heart-sick fear at sight of that yawning water, and those towering walls of blackthorn, where one touch of the hoofs on the topmost bough, one spring too short of the gathered limbs, must have been death to both horse and rider.