“I dragged her from the kitchen, sir,” Hardress said. “She and Miss de Lisle were poring over food—if we get no dinner to-night it will be our fault.”
“If you had the responsibility of feeding fourteen hungry people you wouldn’t make a joke of it,” said Norah. “It’s very solemn, especially when the fishmonger fails you hopelessly.”
“There’s always tinned salmon,” suggested her father.
“Tinned salmon, indeed!” Norah’s voice was scornful. “We haven’t come yet to giving the Tired People dinner out of a tin. However, it’s all right: Miss de Lisle will work some sort of a miracle. I’m not going to think of housekeeping for a whole day!”
The meet was four miles away, near a marshy hollow thickly covered with osiers and willows. A wood fringed the marsh, and covered a hill which rose from a little stream beyond it. Here and there was a glimpse of the yellow flame of gorse. There were rolling fields all round, many of them ploughed: it had not yet been made compulsory for every landowner to till a portion of his holding, but English farmers were beginning to awake to the fact that while the German submarine flourished it would be both prudent and profitable to grow as much food as possible, and the plough had been busy. The gate into the field overlooking the marsh stood open; a few riders were converging towards it from different points. The old days of crowded meets and big fields of riders were gone. Only a few plucky people struggled to keep the hounds going, and to find work for the hunters that had escaped the first requisition of horses for France.
The hounds came into view as Mr. Linton’s party arrived. The “Master” came first, on a big, workmanlike grey; a tall woman, with a weatherbeaten face surmounted by a bowler hat. The hounds trotted meekly after her, one or another pausing now and then to drink at a wayside puddle before being rebuked for bad manners by a watchful whip. Mrs. Ainslie liked the Lintons; she greeted them pleasantly.
“Nice morning,” she said. “Congratulations: I hear the boy is a Captain.”
“We can’t quite realize it,” Norah said, laughing. “You see, we hardly knew he had grown up!”
“Well, he grew to a good size,” said Mrs. Ainslie, with a smile. “Hullo, Geoff. Are you going to follow to-day?”
“They won’t let me,” said Geoffrey dolefully. “I know Brecon and I could, but Mother says we’re too small.”