he ugly incessant hoot and grunt of the motor traffic
gave an added charm to the vision of hill and hollow and copse that
flickered in Yeovil's mind. Slowly, with a sensuous lingering over
detail, his imagination carried him down to a small, sleepy, yet withal
pleasantly bustling market town, and placed him unerringly in a wide
straw-littered yard, half-full of men and quarter-full of horses, with a
bob-tailed sheep-dog or two trying not to get in everybody's way, but
insisting on being in the thick of things. The horses gradually detached
themselves from the crowd of unimportant men and came one by one into
momentary prominence, to be discussed and appraised for their good points
and bad points, and finally to be bid for. And always there was one
horse that detached itself conspicuously from the rest, the ideal hunter,
or at any rate, Yeovil's ideal of the ideal hunter. Mentally it was put
through its paces before him, its pedigree and brief history recounted to
him; mentally he saw a stable lad put it over a jump or two, with credit
to all concerned, and inevitably he saw himself outbidding less
discerning rivals and securing the desired piece of horseflesh, to be the
chief glory and mainstay of his hunting stable, to carry him well and
truly and cleverly through many a joyous long-to-be-remembered run. That
scene had been one of the recurring half-waking dreams of his long days
of weakness in the far-away Finnish nursing-home, a dream sometimes of
tantalising mockery, sometimes of pleasure in the foretaste of a joy to
come. And now it need scarcely be a dream any longer, he had only to go
down at the right moment and take an actual part in his oft-rehearsed
vision. Everything would be there, exactly as his imagination had placed
it, even down to the bob-tailed sheep-dogs; the horse of his imagining
would be there waiting for him, or if not absolutely the ideal animal,
something very like it. He might even go beyond the limits of his dream
and pick up a couple of desirable animals--there would probably be fewer
purchasers for good class hunters in these days than of yore. And with
the coming of this reflection his dream faded suddenly and his mind came
back with a throb of pain to the things he had for the moment forgotten,
the weary, hateful things that were symbolised for him by the standard
that floated yellow and black over the frontage of Buckingham Palace.

Yeovil wandered down to his snuggery, a mood of