te the old
bush-ranging air to-night. Where have you been?" asked the Master, when
Finn rejoined his own family circle in the hall at Nuthill, toward
bedtime that night. Finn silently nuzzled the under side of the Master's
right wrist; but, though his dark eyes were eloquent, it was beyond him
to explain either his doings or his emotions. Yet the Master was not
altogether without understanding of these.

"Fact is," he said to Betty Murdoch, as he affectionately rubbed one of
Finn's ears, "I believe this old gallant has quite fallen in love with
Miss Desdemona, and I could swear he's been hunting in her company
to-night. He has all the look of it. I suspect it carries him back to
old days, past the quarantine, past even Australia--eh, old chap?--and
back to his hunting days about these very Downs, when we were at the
cottage, you know. I had to be a great deal in town in those days,
before we went to Australia, and Finn ran pretty much wild through his
last summer in England."

So the Master did know something of what passed in the wolfhound's mind,
though they had no common language. As a matter of fact, the evening
meeting with Desdemona, the frolic on the Downs, and, at the last, the
running down of that rabbit, had combined to stir Finn more than
anything else had stirred him since he had fought for the Master's life
in a drought-smitten corner of the bush in Australia. Much that had lain
dormant in the great hound since the adventurous days of his leadership
of a dingo pack had waked into active, insistent life that evening, and,
brushing aside the habits of a year's soft living, had filled him once
more with the keenness of the hunter and the fire of the masterful mate
and leader.

It must not be supposed that nostalgia is a modern weakness, or the
monopoly of human minds. When Finn looked out across the moonlit Downs
that night, while strolling round the house with the Master before going
to bed, nostalgia filled his heart to aching-point and clouded his mind
with its elusive, tormenting vapors as surely as ever it clouded the
brain of any human wanderer. It was the nostalgia of the wilderness, of
the life of the wild; and, as he looked out into the moonlight, Finn saw
again in fancy, the boundary-rider's lonely humpy, the rugged, rocky
hills of the Tinnaburra; a fleeing wallaby in the distance, himself in
hot pursuit. He smelt again the tang of crushed gum-leaves, and heard
the fascinating rustle which tells o