and a dozen dogs took up the note,
yelping in full peal. He heard footsteps coming; the door was
opened, and the dogs poured out upon him--spaniels, terriers,
lurchers, greyhounds, and a big Gordon setter--barking at him,
leaping against him, sniffing his calves. Taffy kept them at bay as
best he could and waved his letter at a wall-eyed man in a dirty
yellow waistcoat, who looked down from the doorstep but did not offer
to call them off.

"Any answer?" asked the wall-eyed man.

Taffy could not say. The man took the letter and went to inquire,
leaving him alone with the dogs.

It seemed an age before he reappeared, having in the interval slipped
a dirty livery coat over his yellow waistcoat. "The Squire says
you're to come in." Taffy and the dogs poured together into a high,
stone-flagged hall; then through a larger hall and a long dark
corridor. The footman's coat, for want of a loop, had been hitched
on a peg by its collar, and stuck out behind his neck in the most
ludicrous manner; but he shuffled ahead so fast that Taffy, tripping
and stumbling among the dogs, had barely time to observe this before
a door was flung open and he stood blinking in a large room full of
sunlight.

"Hallo! Here's the parson's bantam!"

The room had four high, bare windows through which the afternoon
sunshine streamed on the carpet. The carpet had a pattern of pink
peonies on a delicate buff ground, and was shamefully dirty. And the
vast apartment, with its white paint and gilding and Italian sketches
in water-colour and statuettes under glass, might have been a lady's
drawing-room. But paint and gilding were tarnished; the chintz
chair-covers soiled and torn; the pictures hung askew; and a smell of
dog filled the air.

Squire Moyle sat huddled in a deep chair beside the fire-place,
facing the middle of the room, where a handsome, high-complexioned
gentleman, somewhat past middle age, lounged on a settee and dangled
a gold-mounted riding crop. A handsome boy knelt at the back of the
settee and leaned over the handsome gentleman's shoulder. On the
floor, between the two men, lay a canvas bag; and something moved
inside it. At the end of the room, by the farthest window, Honoria
knelt over a big portfolio. She wore the grey frock and pink sash
which Taffy had seen in church that morning, and she tossed her dark
hair back from her eyes as she looked up.

The Squire crumpled up the letter in his hand.

"Put the bag a