and plunged into the sea, she knew that it was
no horse but a huge stag--even such a stag as she had seen portrayed on
menagerie posters--a huge Exmoor stag leaping dark against the sun, but
with a flame along the russet-gold ridge of his back and flame tipping
his noble antlers as he laid them back and breasted the quiet swell of
the waves.

The hounds were close upon him. Not until they were close had he
quitted his hide-hole in the stream, where for the last time he had
broken the scent for them. This was the third stream he had used since
they had tufted him out of the wood where through the summer he had
lorded it, thirty-five miles away; and each stream had helped him, and
had failed him in the end. He had weakened the scent over stony ridges,
checked it through dense brakes of gorse, fouled and baffled it by
charging through herds of cattle and groups of hinds of his own race
couching or pasturing with their calves; for the stag-hunting season was
drawing close to its end, and in a few weeks it would be the hinds'
turn. But the hinds knew that their peril was not yet, and, being as
selfish as he, they had helped him but little or not at all. And now
his hour was near.

For even while the children gazed after him the hounds came streaming
down the coombe in a flood, with a man on a grey horse close behind
them; and behind him, but with a gap between, a straggling line of
riders broke into sight, some scarlet-coated, others in black or in
tweeds. The man on the grey horse shouted up the hill to Roger, who had
left his team and was running. Away over the crest above him two
labourers hove in sight, these also running at full speed. And all--
hounds, horses, men--were pouring down the coombe towards the beach.

The hounds swept down in a mass so solid and compact that Tilda dragged
Arthur Miles into the doorway, fearful of being swept by them over the
edge of the fall. Past the cottage they streamed, down over the grassy
cliff, and across the beach. 'Dolph, barking furiously by the edge of
the waves, was caught and borne down by the first line of them--borne
down and rolled over into the water with no more ceremony than if he had
been a log. They did not deign to hurt him, but passed on swimming, and
he found his feet and emerged behind them, sneezing and shaking himself
and looking a fool. He was, as we know, sensitive about looking a fool;
but just then no one had time to laugh at him.

The riders