re subtle," said Will.

"Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle. I don't feel as if I
were subtle," said Dorothea, playfully. "But how long my uncle is! I
must go and look for him. I must really go on to the Hall. Celia is
expecting me."

Will offered to tell Mr. Brooke, who presently came and said that he
would step into the carriage and go with Dorothea as far as Dagley's,
to speak about the small delinquent who had been caught with the
leveret. Dorothea renewed the subject of the estate as they drove
along, but Mr. Brooke, not being taken unawares, got the talk under his
own control.

"Chettam, now," he replied; "he finds fault with me, my dear; but I
should not preserve my game if it were not for Chettam, and he can't
say that that expense is for the sake of the tenants, you know. It's a
little against my feeling:--poaching, now, if you come to look into
it--I have often thought of getting up the subject. Not long ago,
Flavell, the Methodist preacher, was brought up for knocking down a
hare that came across his path when he and his wife were walking out
together. He was pretty quick, and knocked it on the neck."

"That was very brutal, I think," said Dorothea

"Well, now, it seemed rather black to me, I confess, in a Methodist
preacher, you know. And Johnson said, 'You may judge what a
_hypocrite_ he is.' And upon my word, I thought Flavell looked very
little like 'the highest style of man'--as somebody calls the
Christian--Young, the poet Young, I think--you know Young? Well, now,
Flavell in his shabby black gaiters, pleading that he thought the Lord
had sent him and his wife a good dinner, and he had a right to knock it
down, though not a mighty hunter before the Lord, as Nimrod was--I
assure you it was rather comic: Fielding would have made something of
it--or Scott, now--Scott might have worked it up. But really, when I
came to think of it, I couldn't help liking that the fellow should have
a bit of hare to say grace over. It's all a matter of
prejudice--prejudice with the law on its side, you know--about the
stick and the gaiters, and so on. However, it doesn't do to reason
about things; and law is law. But I got Johnson to be quiet, and I
hushed the matter up. I doubt whether Chettam would not have been more
severe, and yet he comes down on me as if I were the hardest man in the
county. But here we are at Dagley's."

Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on.