ry difficult to be
otherwise when one has passed through one considerable crisis, and
foresees a number of others that must be met, especially if one has not
made up one's mind as to the proper line of action. It is all very well
to be sensible, but a difficulty occasionally arises as to which of two
or three courses is the more in accordance with that character. To be
impulsive certainly leads to trouble sometimes, but also, sometimes it
saves it.

Jenny looked charming in repose. She was in a delightful green habit;
she wore a plumy kind of hat; she rode an almost perfect little mare
belonging to Lord Talgarth, and her big blue, steady eyes roved slowly
round her as she went, seeing nothing. It was, in fact, the almost
perfect little mare who first gave warning of the approach to the
sportsmen, by starting violently all over at the sound of a shot, fired
about half a mile away. Jenny steadied her, pulled her up, and watched
between the cocked and twitching ears.

Below her, converging slowly upwards, away from herself, moved a line of
dots, each precisely like its neighbor in color (Lord Talgarth was very
particular, indeed, about the uniform of his beaters), and by each moved
a red spot, which Jenny understood to be a flag. The point towards which
they were directed culminated in a low, rounded hill, and beneath the
crown of this, in a half circle, were visible a series of low defenses,
like fortifications, to command the face of the slope and the dips on
either side. This was always the last beat--in this moor--before lunch;
and lunch itself, she knew, would be waiting on the other side of the
hill. Occasionally as she watched, she saw a slight movement behind
this or that butt--no more--and the only evidence of human beings,
beside the beaters, lay in the faint wreath of all but invisible smoke
that followed the reports, coming now quicker and quicker, as the grouse
took alarm. Once with a noise like a badly ignited rocket, there burst
over the curve before her a flying brown thing, that, screaming with
terrified exultation, whirred within twenty yards of her head and
vanished into silence. (One cocked ear of the mare bent back to see if
the rocket were returning or not.)

Jenny's meditations became more philosophical than ever as she looked.
She found herself wondering how much free choice the grouse--if they
were capable themselves of philosophizing--would imagine themselves to
possess in the face of this nois