-shoots of the moor.
What a jolly party they had had last year in that week of wonderful
October weather! Two hundred brace on the home moor the first day, and
almost as many on the Fairdale moor the following day. Some of the men
had never shot better. One of the party was now Viceroy of India;
another had been killed in one of the endless little frontier fights
that are the price, month by month, which the British Empire pays for
its existence. Douglas had come off particularly well. His shooting from
that butt to the left had been magnificent. Sir Arthur remembered well
how the old hands had praised it, warming the cockles of his own heart.

"I will have one more shoot," he said to himself with passion--"I will!"

Then, feeling suddenly tired, he sat down beside the slipping stream. It
was fairly full, after some recent rain, and the music of it rang in his
ears. Stretching out a hand he filled it full of silky grass and thyme,
sniffing at it in delight. "How strange," he thought, "that I can still
enjoy these things. But I shall--till I die."

Below him, as he sat, lay the greater part of his estate stretching east
and west; bounded on the west by some of the high moors leading up to
the Pennine range, lost on the east in a blue and wooded distance. He
could see the towers of three village churches, and the blurred greys
and browns of the houses clustering round them--some near, some far.
Stone farm-buildings, their white-washed gables glowing under the level
sun, caught his eye, one after the other--now hidden in wood, now
standing out upon the fields or the moorland, with one sycamore or a
group of yews to shelter them. And here and there were larger houses;
houses of the middle gentry, with their gardens and enclosures. Farms,
villages, woods and moors, they were all his--nominally his, for a few
weeks or months longer. And there was scarcely one of them in the whole
wide scene, with which he had not some sporting association; whether of
the hunting field, or the big autumn shoots, or the jolly partridge
drives over the stubbles.

But it suddenly and sharply struck him how very few other associations
he possessed with these places spread below him in the declining August
sunshine. He had not owned Flood more than fifteen years--enough however
to lose it in! And he had succeeded a father who had been the beloved
head of the county, a just and liberal landlord, a man of scrupulous
kindness and honour, for whom e