"I hope you will. You know Mr. Finn. He is here. He and my husband are very old friends. And Adelaide Maule is your cousin. She hunts too. And so does Mr. Maule,—only not quite so energetically. I think that is all we shall have."
Immediately after that all the guests came in at once, and a discussion was heard as they were passing through the hall. "No;—that wasn't it," said Mrs. Spooner loudly. "I don't care what Dick said." Dick Rabbit was the first whip, and seemed to have been much exercised with the matter now under dispute. "The fox never went into Grobby Gorse at all. I was there and saw Sappho give him a line down the bank."
"I think he must have gone into the gorse, my dear," said her husband. "The earth was open, you know."
"I tell you she didn't. You weren't there, and you can't know. I'm sure it was a vixen by her running. We ought to have killed that fox, my Lord." Then Mrs. Spooner made her obeisance to her hostess. Perhaps she was rather slow in doing this, but the greatness of the subject had been the cause. These are matters so important, that the ordinary civilities of the world should not stand in their way.
"What do you say, Chiltern?" asked the husband.
"I say that Mrs. Spooner isn't very often wrong, and that Dick Rabbit isn't very often right about a fox."
"It was a pretty run," said Phineas.
"Just thirty-four minutes," said Mr. Spooner.
"Thirty-two up to Grobby Gorse," asserted Mrs. Spooner. "The hounds never hunted a yard after that. Dick hurried them into the gorse, and the old hound wouldn't stick to his line when she found that no one believed her."
This was on a Monday evening, and the Brake hounds went out generally five days a week. "You'll hunt to-morrow, I suppose?" Lady Chiltern said to Silverbridge.