been.

Christian received these effusions with a characteristic mixture of
respect for the artistic effort that they described, and of amused,
almost pitying comprehension of the enthusiasm that they revealed. It
was three years since Larry had left Oxford and gone to France, and
during those years Christian had learned more of life than Larry had
acquired, or would ever acquire, in spite of the three years' start of
her with which he had begun the world.

Judith had been induced to close her brilliant career as a buccaneer,
by a perfectly, even--from the buccaneering point of view--depressingly
satisfactory marriage with Mr. William Kirby, and her departure had
forced her younger sister into the front rank of domestic combatants.
At Mount Music, where once the milk and honey had flowed with
effortless abundance, each year brought increasing stress. The rents
grew less, the expenses greater, that large and omnivorous item, known
as "keeping up the place," was as exacting as ever, the minor problems
of household existence more acute. There had been a time when the
Mount Music tenants had vied with one another in the provision of sons
and daughters for service in the Big House, when bonfires had blazed
for the return of "the young gentlemen," and offerings of eggs had
greeted "the young ladies." Now the propitiatory turkey that heralded
a request, the goose that signalised a success, gained with the help
of the hereditary helpers, had all ceased. Alien influences had
poisoned the wells of friendship. Such rents as were paid were
extracted by the hard hand of the law, and the tenants held
indignation meetings against the landlord who refused to resign to
them what they believed to be theirs, and he was equally convinced was
his. Major Dick still shot and fished, as was his right, over the
lands and waters that were still in his name, but the tenants, whose
fathers had loved him, had renounced the old allegiance. The
partridges were run down by the greyhounds that had killed off the
hares; the salmon were poached; worst of all, Derrylugga Gorse, the
covert that Dick had planted twenty-five years ago, on Carmody's farm,
in the middle of the best of the Broadwater Vale country, was burned
down, and a vixen and her cubs had perished with it.

Dick gave up the hounds at the end of the season.

"I've done my best to show sport for five and twenty years," he said,
"and I'm not going to spoil it now!"

It is impossible to d