had arrived, and reined up, crowding the ledge before the
cottage, and the most of them stood raising themselves in their
stirrups, gazing after the stag that now, with little more than his
antlers visible like a bleached bough moving on the flood, swam strongly
out into the golden mist still cloaking the Island. Moment by moment he
out-distanced the wedge-shaped ripple where the heads of the tired pack
bobbed in pursuit; for here, as always in water, the deer held the
advantage, being able to float and rest at will while the hound must
always ply his forelegs or sink. The huntsman, however, judged it
impossible that he could reach Holmness. He and a dozen gentlemen had
dismounted, clambered down beside the fall, and were dragging the boat
down the beach to launch her, when Roger and the two labourers burst
through the throng and took charge; since to recover a deer that takes
to the sea means a guinea from the hunt. And the boat was necessary
now, for as the Inistow men launched her and sprang aboard the leading
hounds realised that their quarry could not be headed, or that their
remaining strength would scarcely carry them back to shore, and gave up
the chase. By this the hunted stag gained another respite, for as the
rowers pulled in his wake they had to pause half a dozen times and haul
on board a hound that appeared on the point of sinking.

At the last moment the huntsman had leapt into the stern-sheets of the
boat. He had his knife ready, and the rowers too had a rope ready to
lasso the stags' antlers when they caught up with him. Ashore the
huddled crowd of riders watched the issue. The children watched with
them; and while they watched a sharp, authoritative voice said, close
above Tilda's ear--

"They won't reach him now. He'll sink before they get to him, and I'm
glad of it. He's given us the last and best run of as good a season as
either of us can remember--eh, Parson?"

Tilda looked up with a sudden leap of the heart. Above her, on a raw
roan, sat a strong-featured lady in a bottle-green riding-habit, with a
top hat--the nap of which had apparently being brushed the wrong way--
set awry on her iron-grey locks.

The clergyman she addressed--a keen-faced, hunting parson, elderly,
clean-shaven, upright as a ramrod on his mud-splashed grey--answered
half to himself and in a foreign tongue.

"Latin, hey? You must translate for me."

"A pagan sentiment, ma'am, from a pagan poet . . . If I were