I seemed to be lapsing rapidly into the terrible third that spoils sport, so I left them; but not all the adjurations of Godfrey Parndon invoking his favorite antagonist to the whist-table could draw Guy from his post again that evening.
I know men who would have given five years of life for the whisper that glided into his ear as he gave Miss Bellasys her candle on retiring, ten for the Parthian glance that shot its arrow home.
CHAPTER IX.
"I know the purple vestment;
I know the crest of flame;
So ever rides Mamilius,
Prince of the Latian name."
The next was a perfect hunting morning; a light breeze, steady from the southwest, and not too much sun; the very day when a scent, in and out of cover, would be a certainty, if there were any calculation on this contingency. Let us do our sisters justice—there is one thing in nature more uncertain and capricious than the whims of womankind.
The hounds had come up with their usual train of officials, and of those steady-going sportsmen who love the pack better than their own children, and can call each individual in it by his name. Godfrey Parndon was doing the civil to the "great men in Israel," his heaviest subscribers; pinks were gleaming in every direction through the clumps and belts of plantation, as the men came up at a hard gallop on their cover-hacks, or opened the pipes of their hunters by a stretch over the turf of the park.