n his
teeth. Finn had noticed that she moved wearily, as though action taxed
her strength; yet he thought her unaccountably ready to walk away from
him.

He ran down a rabbit for his mate, and deposited it before her at the
cave's mouth in the most friendly manner. Then, before he could get time
to tear the pelt off for her, the Lady Desdemona, with a snappishness
more suggestive of a hedge-side cur than of a hound of her rank,
actually snatched away the rabbit, and with never a "Thank you," or a
"By your leave," carried it right inside the cave, dropping it there and
returning to bar the entrance, with a look in her red-hawed eyes and a
lift of her golden flews which, if not actual snarling, was, as folks
say, near enough to make no difference. At least it very plainly told
Finn he was not wanted there; and the limits of his punctilious courtesy
having now been passed, he had turned away without look or sound and
descended the Down in high dudgeon.

It was clear to Finn that his mate needed a lesson in manners, and so,
moodily, he stalked away and went hungry to bed like the illogical male
creature he was, vaguely surmising that in his discomfort there must be
something of retribution for Desdemona. Had he but known it, he had a
long line of human precedents in the matter of this particular piece of
foolishness, even to the detail of the untasted dinner-dish which he
left in the back porch when he went to bed at Nuthill.

VIII

FINN IS ENLIGHTENED

Next morning courtesy demanded that Finn should accept Betty Murdoch's
invitation to accompany her on a rather long walk. She had bills to pay
and calls to make in the village. Finn went, of course, stalking
silently beside pretty, cheery Betty. But he made a poor companion, and
Betty even told the Master at luncheon that she thought Finn was not
very well, so dull and uninterested in anything he had appeared all the
morning.

"H'm! I suspect he misses Lady Desdemona," said the Master. "Puzzling
thing, that. I can't make out why they're not together."

The fact was, Finn found the nursing of his offended dignity a wearisome
task. It was all very well to rebuke Desdemona by ignoring her
existence; but could he be quite sure that she noticed his absence or
cared about it? And in any case, whether or not it affected her, it
certainly bored him very much. He missed greatly the companionship of
his mate, and not a bit the less because she had been so rude to him