'Poor little things, they fell out of the nest before they could fly, and I brought them up. You don't care for pets?'
'I don't like birds. I couldn't sit in a room with a large bird.
There's something in the sensation of feathers I can't bear.'
'Don't like birds! Why, that seems as if you said that you didn't like flowers.'
And while the young squire talked to his bailiff Kitty fed her rooks. They cawed, and flew to her hand for the scraps of meat. The coachman came to speak about oats and straw. They went to the stables. Kitty adored horses, and it amused John to see her pat them, and her vivacity and light-heartedness rather pleased him than otherwise.
Nevertheless, during the whole of the following week the ladies held little communication with John. In the morning he went out with his bailiffs to inspect farms and consult about possible improvement and necessary repairs. He had appointments with his solicitor. There were accounts to be gone through. He never paid a bill without verifying every item. At four o'clock he came in to tea, his head full of calculations of such complex character that even his mother could not follow the different statements to his satisfaction. When she disagreed with him he took up the Epistles of St. Columban of Bangor the Epistola ad Sethum, or the celebrated poem, Epistola ad Fedolium, written when the saint was seventy-two, and continued his reading, making copious notes in a pocket-book.
IV.
On the morning of the meet of the hounds he was called an hour earlier. He drank a cup of tea and ate a piece of dry toast in a back room. The dining-room was full of servants, who laid out a long table rich with comestibles and glittering with glass. Mrs. Norton and Kitty were upstairs dressing.
He wandered into the drawing-room and viewed the dead, cumbrous furniture; the two cabinets bright with brass and veneer. He stood at the window staring. It was raining. The yellow of the falling leaves was hidden in grey mist. 'This weather will keep many away; so much the better; there will be too many as it is. I wonder who this can be.' A melancholy brougham passed up the drive. There were three old maids, all looking sweetly alike; one was a cripple who walked with crutches, and her smile was the best and the gayest imaginable smile.
'How little material welfare has to do with our happiness,' thought John. 'There is one whose path is the narrowest, and she is happier and better than I.' And then the three sweet old maids talked with their cousin of the weather; and they all wondered—a sweet feminine wonderment—if he would see a girl that day whom he would marry.
Presently the house was full of people. The passage was full of girls; a few men sat at breakfast at the end of the long table. Some red- coats passed. The huntsman stopped in front of the house, the dogs sniffed here and there, the whips trotted their horses and drove them back. 'Get together, get together; get back there! Woodland Beauty, come up here.' The hounds rolled on the grass and leaned their fore- paws on the railings, willing to be caressed.