“Too bad!” said Mrs. Ainslie. “Never mind; you’ll be big pretty soon.”
A tall old man in knickerbockers greeted her: Squire Brand, who owned a famous property a few miles away, and who had the reputation of never missing a meet, although he did not ride. He knew every inch of the country; it was said that he could boast, at the end of a season, that he had, on the whole, seen more of the runs than any one else except the Master. He was a tireless runner, with an extraordinarily long stride, which carried him over fields and ditches and gave him the advantage of many a short cut impossible to most people. He knew every hound by name; some said he knew every fox in the country; and he certainly had an amazing knowledge of the direction a fox was likely to take. Horses, on the other hand, bored him hopelessly; he consented to drive them, in the days when motors were not, but merely as a means of getting from place to place. A splendid car, with a chauffeur much smarter than his master, had just dropped him: a grant figure in weatherbeaten Harris tweeds, grasping a heavy stick.
“We should get a good run to-day,” he said.
“Yes—with luck,” Mrs. Ainslie answered.
“Any news from the Colonel?”
“Nothing in particular—plenty of hard fighting. But he never writes much of that. He’s much more interested in a run he had with a queer scratch pack near their billets. I can’t quite gather how it was organized, but it comprised two beagles and a greyhound and a fox-terrier and a pug. He said they had a very sporting time!”
Squire Brand chuckled.
“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “Did he say what they hunted?”
“Anything they could get, apparently. They began with a hare, and then got on to a rabbit, in some mysterious fashion. They finished up with a brisk run in the outskirts of a village, and got a kill—it turned out this time to be a cat!” Mrs. Ainslie’s rather grim features relaxed into a smile. “If any one had told Val two years ago that he would be enthusiastic over a day like that!”
A few other riders had come up: two or three officers from a neighbouring town; a couple of old men, and a sprinkling of girls. Philip Hardress was the only young man in plain clothes, and strangers who did not suspect anything amiss with his leg looked at him curiously.