"Not a line. I ain't got nothing to say to him. He knows I'm a-going out of the house; and if he don't, you can tell him."
"Where are you going to?"
"Well, I was going to fit up a room or two in the old farmhouse; and if I had anything like a lease, I wouldn't mind spending three or four hundred pounds there. I was thinking of talking to you about it, Mr. Knox."
"I can't renew the lease without his approval."
"You write and ask him, and mind you tell him that there ain't no doubt at all as to any going out of Cross Hall after Christmas. Then, if he'll make it fourteen years, I'll put the old house up and not ask him for a shilling. As I'm a living sinner, they're on a fox! Who'd have thought of that in the park? That's the old vixen from the holt, as sure as my name's Price. Them cubs haven't travelled here yet."
So saying, he rode away, and Mr. Knox rode after him, and there was consternation throughout the hunt. It was so unaccustomed a thing to have to gallop across Manor Cross Park! But the hounds were in full cry, through the laurels, and into the shrubbery, and round the conservatory, close up to the house. Then she got into the kitchen-garden, and back again through the laurels. The butler and the gardener and the housemaid and the scullery-maid were all there to see. Even Lady Sarah came to the front door, looking very severe, and the old Marchioness gaped out of her own sitting-room window upstairs. Our friend Mary thought it excellent fun, for she was really able to ride to the hounds; and even Lady Amelia became excited as she flogged the pony along the road. Stupid old vixen, who ought to have known better! Price was quite right, for it was she, and the cubs in the holt were now finally emancipated from all maternal thraldom. She was killed ignominiously in the stokehole under the greenhouse,—she who had been the mother of four litters, and who had baffled the Brotherton hounds half a dozen times over the cream of the Brotherton country!
"I knew it," said Price in a melancholy tone, as he held up the head which the huntsman had just dissevered from the body. "She might 'a done better with herself than come to such a place as this for the last move."
"Is it all over?" asked Lady George.
"That one is pretty nearly all over, miss," said George Scruby, as he threw the fox to the hounds. "My Lady, I mean, begging your Ladyship's pardon." Some one had prompted him at the moment. "I'm very glad to see your Ladyship out, and I hope we'll show you something better before long."
But poor Mary's hunting was over. When George Scruby and Sir Simon and the hounds went off to the holt, she was obliged to remain with her husband and sisters-in-law.