158 THE HAUGHTYSHIRE HUNT. 



Chase, they fell in with Jack Dashwood, who had returned on 

 the worthless brute he had ridden, reassumed his tweed suit, 

 and was now, full of fury and Bass's ale, puffing savagely at one 

 of Travers's cigars, and doing ' sentry-go ' up and down the 

 path outside the hall door. He would ' make that devil of a 

 horse go over a fence, or know the reason why.' He would 

 ' cut him into ribbons,' but what he'd make him go. He'd 



kill the brute. He'd — he'd — he'd "Hullo! you chaps 



are back pretty early," and he broke off his reflections upon 

 the iniquities of the cobby little black horse, as his two 

 friends ranged up alongside him. And then each explained 

 to the others how this was and how that was, and finally the 

 trio adjourned to Travers's own little room, and drowned 

 their annoyance with each other and the world at large in 

 what Ouida calls ' frothing, foaming, amber liquid,' but 

 which in our prosaic way we generally speak of as a whisky 

 and soda. 



Even such gay and enthusiastic worshippers at Cupid's 

 shrine as the Duke of Haughtyshire require a certain amount 

 of suitable environment in order to carry on their love-making, 

 and it must be confessed that the bleak hilltop on which we 

 left His Grace, with darkness falling rapidly over the land, and 

 a cold, driving rain, to say nothing of the now freshening wind, 

 hardly supplied a fitting frame for the picture so constantly in 

 the Ducal mind of the respective loves of Venus and Adonis, 

 Chloe and Strephon, in which he himself naturally always 

 played the male title I'ole. 



" I don't know — I really can't think, where we are," 

 exclaimed Adela, somewhat in dismay, as she gazed helplessly 

 round on the bare, undulating down-land. She was conscious 



