ite, while they repudiate, society. "No, I'm
not coming out. Too early for me. Come in and eat something--breakfast
or lunch, anything--when you've done enough."

The hounds moved on and were soon busy in the screens of glossy laurel
round the house. Other riders arrived. A fox was found, if not in the
kitchenmaid's bedroom in some spot of almost equal intimacy, and the
Hunt surged in and through yards, and haggards, outhouses, and
gardens, the hounds over-running all the complicated surroundings of
an Irish country-house, while every grade of domestic, forsaking his
or her lawful occupation, joined in the chase.

Christian had betaken herself to a point on the avenue remote from the
fray. A run, she told herself, would have tranquillised her, and made
things seem more normal, but there was no prospect of one. "I'll wait
till this rat-hunt is over," she thought, letting Joker stroll across
the park towards a little lake, shining amidst bracken and bushes, a
jewel dropped from heaven. A couple of stiff-necked swans floated in
motionless trance upon it; black water-hens flapped in flashing,
splashing flight to safety as Christian came near; a string of
patchwork coloured mandarin-ducks propelled themselves in jerks
towards her, confident that any human being meant food. Two gigantic
turquoise dragon-flies rose, with a dry crackle of talc-like wings,
from a dead log under Joker's feet. One of them swung round the
horse's head, and lit on his shaven neck. It brooded there, apparently
unperceptive of the difference of this resting place from the one that
it had abandoned; its dull globes of eyes looked as if sight was the
last purpose for which they were intended. Joker stretched his long
neck to nibble a willow twig, and the blue mystery, rising, remained
poised over him for another moment of meditation, before it sailed
away, sideways, on its own obscure occasions.

Christian sat in the sunshine, and thought about Larry, and wondered.
She knew now that what she felt for him was no new thing. It had been
with her always, not merely since the painting of her portrait, but
always, unacknowledged yet implicit, ever since that first day when he
had rescued her from Richard. Her intensely criticising, analytic
brain refused to surrender to vague emotion. She was resolved to
understand herself, to rationalise her overthrow. It was the
difference, for which that half-hour of sunset was responsible, in the
degree of what she fel