earnest endeavor to satisfy, so far as she was able, all the calls of
her little blind tyrants. Her will to succeed as a mother was at least
equal to that which any creature of the wild could have known. But her
powers of contrivance, her cunning, endurance, and, in short, her
command of success, in conditions approximating to those of motherhood
in the wild, were necessarily not equal to those of wild-born folk.

For the first time in her life the Lady Desdemona was now living hardly,
but it must not be supposed that this meant unhappiness for her. That
would be far from the truth. The modern hound's sophisticated ancestry
is almost as ancient as that of men-folk; but withal he remains very
much nearer in every way to the life of the wild, and can revert to it
with far more ease. There are penalties attaching to the process,
however, and even at the time her puppies were born the Lady Desdemona
had grown noticeably less sleek than her habit had been at Shaws; just
as even a few days of unsheltered life in the woods--nay, even
twenty-four hours without a bedroom--will make a man or woman notably
less sleek.

The fact was that, upon her present diet, at all events, the young
bloodhound was not quite equal to the task of nourishing five puppies.
No doubt Nature--whose wisdom so often is mistaken for ruthlessness by
pessimistically inclined observers of the surfaces of things--had a
watchful eye upon Desdemona in her cave.

On the morning of the fifth day of the puppies' lives Desdemona was out
and about before the sun, and her hunting took her somewhat far afield.
While she hunted--doubtless introducing fear into several rabbit earths,
and tragedy into one--Destiny came knocking at the door of her own cave,
and left his sign manual there in letters of blood. On her homeward way,
the half of a young rabbit gripped between her jaws, Desdemona suddenly
picked up a fresh trail close to the cave. In the same instant the
half-rabbit fell from her parted jaws and her nose went to earth, while
premonition of disaster smote at her heart and all the channeled lines
of her forehead deepened.

A few urgent bounds carried her to the mouth of the cave. Two more
steps, and the events of the last half-hour lay plain before her eyes.
Two of her puppies lay dead, and in the throat of one of them there
still were fastened the teeth of their slayer: a full-grown,
tawny-coated stoat. The blood-drinking stoat was of no greater length
than