be he wouldn't get her right!

Aloud he said, peremptorily and professionally:

"Christian, I'm going to paint you! Eight o'clock at the studio
to-morrow morning, _Ma'mselle, s'il vous plait_!"

Christian's response was closured by a wild outcry from the wood,
hounds and horn lifting up their voices together in sudden delirium.
Old horses pricked their ears, and young ones, and notably, Nancy,
began to fret and to fidget. Some one said, unnecessarily: "That's
him!" A man, farther down the road, turned his horse, and standing in
his stirrups, stared over the wall into the thick covert, rigid as a
dog setting his game. Then he held up his hat, and, a moment later,
something brown glided, with the fluent swiftness of a fish in a
stream, across the road and over the opposite wall. The scream that
followed him was not needed; was, indeed, hardly heard in the
crashing, clashing clamour of the back, as they came pitching headlong
over the wall of the wood, and hurling themselves at the opposite
wall. It was high, and had a coped, top, and the yelling hounds broke
against it, and fell, like waves against a cliff. A couple achieved
it, and the anguish of their comrades, as they heard them go away,
full-cry, on the line, redoubled. In the same instant, Larry was off
his tall bay. He flung his reins to Christian, and was into the
struggling pack. It is no easy matter to heave a hound over a high
wall, but Larry and a young farmer had somehow shoved over four
couple, before Bill Kirby and his whipper-in came and swept the
remainder to a place of possible entrance a little further on.

Larry snatched his plunging horse from Christian, and started to
gallop before he was fairly in the saddle, kicking his right foot into
the stirrup as he went, and shouting gratitude to Christian for having
held the horse. It had not been easy. Nancy had proved the accuracy of
her groom's statement by again "going up as straight as a ribbon" when
the hounds crossed the road, and the bay had not been backward in
emulating her efforts. Bill Kirby had had luck; the fox had run
left-handed under the wall, and the leading hounds met the Master,
with the body of the pack, at the verge of the wood on its farther
side. A bank, pitted with rabbit-holes, a space of stony lane with a
pole at its farther end, and Nad Wood was a thing of the past.

Outside, a fair stretch of grass presented itself, falling in mild
gradients to the banks of the Broadwater, spr