"Mossoo ran the supper and he ordered three brace," said Bill, "but they never turned up till the week after the show! The postman was viewed coming up to the Mess towing something after him on a long painter. The painter was superfluous. The chickens would have followed him at a trot if he had been kind to them. They kept them for the drag, I believe. Didn't you, Mossoo? He's one of the Whips, you know."
"They'd have been quite useful," admitted Mr. Simpson-Hodges.
"How interesting to be a Whip!" said Philippa, looking at him with egregious respect.
"Rather too interesting, sometimes," replied Simpson-Hodges, expanding to the glance in a way not unfamiliar to me. "Last time we were out the fellow with the drag started from the cross-roads where we were going to meet, and was asinine enough to take it a bit down the road before he went into the country, and, as it happened, we were bringing the hounds up to the meet by that particular road. They simply put down their heads and ran it heel for all they were worth! The First Whip and I galloped our best, but we couldn't get to their heads, and we all charged into the middle of the meet full-cry!"
"Oh! I wish I had been there!" said Philippa ardently.
"We wished we were anywhere else," replied Mr. Simpson-Hodges; "the Brigadier was there, and everybody. We heard all about it afterwards, I can tell you!"
"That ought to have happened in Mr. Knox's country, Major Yeates!" said Lady Derryclare, whose interest in fox-hunting was more sympathetic than technical.
"We don't run drags, Lady Derryclare," I said reproachfully, but Lady Derryclare had already entered upon another topic.
Simpson-Hodges, however, did not end there.
A week afterwards Philippa and I crept home, third class, with full trunks and empty pockets, sustained only by the aphorism, evolved by my wife, that economies, and not extravagances, are what one really regrets. It was approaching the end of November before we next heard of Simpson-Hodges. The Derryclares had come down for their first woodcock shoot, and Bill swooped over one morning in the big Daimler and whirled us back with him over the forty intervening miles of bog and mountain, to shoot, and to dance on the carpet after dinner, and to act charades; to further, in short, the various devices for exercising and disciplining a house party. Mr. John Simpson-Hodges was there, no less ornamental than in London, and as useful as he was ornamental. He shot well, he danced beautifully, and he made of the part of a French Count in a charade so surprising a work of art that people said—as is the habit of people—that he ought to be making a hundred a week on the stage.