126 MISSpADSWORTH, M.F.H. 



worked. Look at old Niobe yonder, she's used to being 

 about the place with my missus or me since her day's gone 

 by, she's as 'cute as Miss Badsworth's little terrier, and a 

 smarter dog I never saw — varmint to the tip of his tail; it 

 ain't the hounds theirselves, it's how they're used." 



" I daresay you are right, Summers. I must be off," Jack 

 said, unhitching his cob. " I'll tell Miss Badsworth about 

 Bill Sheppard." 



" I think he would suit, sir." 

 " Better than I should, anyway ? " 

 *' Yes, sir, asking your pardon, better than you." 

 Jack waved his hand as he rode away, and Summers 

 watched him disappear, then he said to himself: — 



** He'd want to be looking after the young lady instead of 

 the hounds ; hounds ain't the only stoopid things ; but there, 

 he's young, and I don't blame him, blest if I do." 



When Jack Morgan seated himself in his well-worn arm- 

 chair after luncheon, he had come to the extraordinary con- 

 clusion that, for the first time, he found the house dull ; it 

 had never appeared dull before, and he had resided alone at 

 Newnton for some nine years. He said something hard 

 about the late Hugo Badsworth, though what he had to do 

 with the home comforts of Newnton did not appear, unless, 

 of course, certain ramifications of circumstances were con- 

 sidered. 



There are people (conscientious people, they call them- 

 selves) who, for want of something better to do, analyse 

 their thoughts and try to trace them back to an original 

 source, and having arrived there, go off at a tangent and 

 worry themselves with the consideration of what they might 

 have thought instead. Jack Morgan did nothing of the 

 kind, there was no necessity. Just opposite him as he sat 

 was a glass-fronted case with sliding doors, on the lower 

 shelves of which was an array of top-boots, ''roughed up" 

 (as he would have said) for the summer. Those boots were 

 the connecting link which suggested the remarks about the 



