They came by one o'clock to one of the prettiest pieces of rough shooting on the ground—a long, very narrow strip of moorland country bounded on both sides by reclaimed fields, tufted thickly with heather, diversified by young clumps of fir and dense, low-growing bushes, and honey-combed with rabbit burrows. It was scarcely more than sixty yards across, but full half a mile in length, and the sport it afforded was most varied and unconjecturable. On warm days partridges would be here, covey after covey, sunning in the sandy little hollows bare of growth, or busy among the heather, and from the thickness of the cover and the undulations of the ground, a big covey would seldom take the air together, but rise one by one, or in couples, without general alarm being given, to right or left of the guns, or even behind them, so close had the birds lain in the long grasses. Here and there attempts had at one time been made to bring the land into cultivation, and as you tramped through heather, you would suddenly come on a vague-edged square of potato-planting, the vegetable run riot with great wealth of thick leaf; or a strip of corn already half wild, and with a predominant ingredient of tares, would make you go slowly on the certainty of the break of brown wings, or the delayed and head-down scurry of a hare.
To those happily old-fashioned enough to care for the sober joys of walking up, it was the very poetry of sport, but to-day it appeared to Geoffrey a barren and unprofitable place. For the last hour the questions that tormented him had been volleying even more insistently; horrible doubts and suspicions, no longer quite vague, flocked round his head like a flight of unclean birds, and he desired one thing only—to get to the gun room alone and clear up a certain point.
They had to walk over a bare and depopulated stubble to get to this delectable ground, and Harry, as they neared it, looked first at Geoffrey's lacklustre face, then at his watch.
"I had no idea it was so late, Geoff," he said; "I think we'll take the rough after lunch. We're only half a mile from the house, and you look as if lunch would do you good."
He took the cartridges carefully out of his gun.
"No mistake this time," he said. "We'll start over the rough at two—Kimber, meet us here. Oh, by the way, come up to the house; I want to ask you something."
Geoffrey gave up his gun with a sigh of relief.
"Yes; let's do that piece afterward," he said; "I can't hit a sitting haystack this morning, Harry."
"There's one; have a shot at it," said Harry. "O Geoff, don't look so awful! What has happened? There is a hole in the gun-room ceiling. You didn't do it, and I'm not going to send the bill to you."
"But aren't you frightened?" asked Geoffrey. "Are you made of flesh and blood?"