"Ah! but that's such a mistake," said Sir Herbert, "especially for a female, if I may call you so. When your body is well dressed your mind is well dressed. You should look into that."
"I have," said Nancy. "It's all a question of buttons."
What she meant by this aphorism did not appear, for a shot from the right of the line made Sir Herbert spring to attention, and immediately after, with a sudden whir, a high pheasant shot like a bullet over his head, and flying straight into the charge from his gun, turned over in the air and fell with a thud on the grass far behind him.
"Glorious!" exclaimed the Judge. "I'm in form." But although he fired many barrels during the next few minutes, in which a hot fusillade was going on on the right and on the left, and birds were falling, clean shot, or sliding to the ground with wings outspread, or continuing their swift flight unshaken, he brought only one down, with a broken wing, which ran off into the shaugh at the top of the hill.
"Now that is most disappointing," he said, when the tap-tap of the beaters' sticks could be heard, and they began to emerge from the wood one by one. "I really did think I was going to shoot well to-day. Life is full of such delusive hopes."
"I'm glad you didn't shoot too many," said Nancy. "They're such pretty things, and I like to see them get away."
"So do I, in theory," said Sir Herbert. "In practice, no. Do you think it is the lust for killing, as some people say?"
"Oh no," said Nancy. "I have thought about that. If it were, I shouldn't want to come out. It is the skill."
"I think you're right, Nancy. That, and what remains of the primitive instinct of the chase. You had to kill your food, and you kept your health by doing so. You killed two birds with one stone."
"And now you don't even kill one bird with two barrels," said Nancy, with a side-glance at his eye.