'I often feel this when stormy weather is at hand,' replied the other with an attempt at a smile, but a ghastly one; and Annot said no more, as she had already seen that the slightest reference to her secret ailment irritated Mrs. Lindsay, who abruptly left her.
'There is not much liking lost between us,' thought the young lady, as she adjusted in the breast of her morning dress a bunch of stephanotis Roland had given her. 'It is evident, too, that Mrs. Lindsay knows little of county society, and is one with whom county society is shy of associating. Well, well; when Roland and I are married, this grim matron shall be relegated from Earlshaugh to the Dower House at King's Wood. It is a pity we shall not be able to send her farther off.'
Meanwhile the sportsmen were getting to work, and the guns began to bang in the coverts.
Autumn was rapidly advancing now; every portion of the beautiful landscape told the eye so. The summer look was gone, and the sound of the leaves fluttering down was apt to make one thoughtful. Then even the sun seems older; he rises later, and goes to bed earlier. The singing birds had gone from the King's Wood and the Earl's Haugh to warmer climes. The swallows were preparing to leave, assembling at their own places on the banks of the burn, waiting till thousands mustered for their mysterious southern flight. Elsewhere, as Clare has it, might be seen—
'The hedger stopping gaps, amid the leaves,
Which time o'erhead in every colour weaves;
The milkmaid passing, with a timid look,
From stone to stone across the brimming brook;
The cottar journeying with his noisy swine
Along the wood side, where the branches twine;
Shaking from many oaks the acorns brown,
Or from the hedges red haws dashing down.'
But the scenery was lost on the sportsmen, who had eyes and ears for the pheasants alone!
The keepers and beaters were waiting at the corner of the King's Wood when Roland and his friends made their appearance.
Though the copses had not lost all their autumnal glory, the season was an advanced one; a cold breeze swept down the grassy glens, and frost rime hung for a time on boughs and thick undergrowth, sparkling like diamonds in the bright morning sunshine, till melted away; and in the clear air was heard that which someone describes as the indescribable and never-to-be-forgotten sound for the sportsman—that of the pheasant as he rises before the advancing line of beaters—when the cock bird, roused by the tapping of their sticks on the tree trunks, whirrs high over the tops to some sanctuary in the wood, which the gun beneath him fates him never to reach.
A spirt of smoke spouts upward, some brown feathers puff out in the air, and with closed wings the beautiful bird falls within some thirty yards of its killer.
Though the shooting was most successful, other coverts than the King's Wood were tried, some of which gave pheasants, others rabbits and hares, till fairly good bags were made; and so the sportsmen shot down the side of a remote spur of the Ochil hills—save the banging of the guns no other sounds being heard but the beating of sticks against trees or whin bushes, and the voices of Gavin and the beaters shouting, 'Mark cock,' ''Ware hen,' 'Hare forward,' and so on, till a dark dell was reached—a regular zeriba (Roland called it) of bracken, briars, and gorse—where luncheon was to meet the party—one of the not least pleasant features of a day's shooting; but the sportsmen had become so intent on their work that they now realized fully for the first time that the day had become overcast; masses of dark gathered cloud had enveloped the sun; that dense gray mist was rolling along the upper slopes of the hills, and in the distant direction of Earlshaugh, the dark and blurred horizon showed that rain was pouring aslant, and so heavily that Maude and Hester, who had promised to bring the viands in the pony phaeton, would not dream of leaving the shelter of the house.