as she did. She had made a
_detour_ to avoid the schoolroom windows. Her birthday party was
toward, and charades (accounting for her moustache) were in full
swing. But the message from Cottingham, secretly conveyed together
with the couples, by the pantry boy, transcended in importance all
other human affairs. She had slipped away from her fellows, and having
endured the hunting cap and the kennel coat, as the wear suitable to
such an occasion, she had not lost a minute in coming to the horn.

Cottingham, Major Talbot-Lowry's First Whip and kennel huntsman, a
single-souled little Devonshire man, whose dyed hair was the solitary
indication of the age it was intended to conceal, awaited her outside
the kennels.

"Well, Missie, I knew you'd come," he said, approvingly. "It's Amazon
that's away--that little badger-pye bitch we got last week--I 'ad to
give 'er a bit of a 'iding--she tried to run a sheep when we was
walkin' out last evening--she's a revengeful sort, she is, and very
artful, and when we gets near kennels, her took an' bolted past Jimmy
over the 'ill, an' I says to Jimmy, 'Why you fool' I says--"

The tale continued at length, and with those repetitions and
recapitulations peculiar to the simple, but by no means short annals
of the poor, and especially of the English poor. Yet, Christian, the
impatient, the ardent, stood and listened with respectful and absorbed
interest. Cottingham might be elderly, egotistic, long-winded, but at
this period of her career, Christian's hot heart beat throb for throb
with his, and the thought, as he said, of "that pore little bitch
stoppin' out, and maybe spoilt, so that there'd be nothin' for us but
to shoot her, through learnin' to run sheep," had precisely the same
horror for her as for him.

"I couldn't, so to speak, lay me 'and on 'er now; her wouldn't let me
go anear 'er, nor she wouldn't let Jimmy neither, but she ain't far
away, and she'd 'ave what I might call cawnfidence in you, Missie--"
Cottingham had at length concluded: "Her's that sly we mightn't never
see 'er again! But you take and go up that 'ill, Missie, that's where
I seen 'er last, I'll lay you get 'er if anyone can!"

Christian, "still," as Rossetti says, "with the whole of pleasure,"
received these instructions reverently, and with the pockets of the
kennel-coat further loaded with broken biscuit, "took and went"
according to instructions. She climbed the fence behind the kennels,
and addressed hers