along fallow and plough, hedgerow and wooded lane, for nigh on an hour, and had pressed hard on his life for the last few minutes, receded suddenly into the background of his experiences.  The cold, wet meadow, the thick mask of woods, and the oncoming dusk had stayed the chase—­and the fox had outstayed it.  In a short time he would fall mechanically to licking off some of the mud that caked on his weary pads; in a shorter time horsemen and hounds would have drawn off kennelward and homeward.

Yeovil rode through the deepening twilight, relying chiefly on his horse to find its way in the network of hedge-bordered lanes that presumably led to a high road or to some human habitation.  He was desperately tired after his day’s hunting, a legacy of weakness that the fever had bequeathed to him, but even though he could scarcely sit upright in his saddle his mind dwelt complacently on the day’s sport and looked forward to the snug cheery comfort that awaited him at his hunting box.  There was a charm, too, even for a tired man, in the eerie stillness of the lone twilight land through which he was passing, a grey shadow-hung land which seemed to have been emptied of all things that belonged to the daytime, and filled with a lurking, moving life of which one knew nothing beyond the sense that it was there.  There, and very near.  If there had been wood-gods and wicked-eyed fauns in the sunlit groves and hill sides of old Hellas, surely there were watchful, living things of kindred mould in this dusk-hidden wilderness of field and hedge and coppice.

It was Yeovil’s third or fourth day with the hounds, without taking into account a couple of mornings’ cub-hunting.  Already he felt that he had been doing nothing different from this all his life.  His foreign travels, his illness, his recent weeks in London, they were part of a tapestried background that had very slight and distant connection with his present existence.  Of the future he tried to think with greater energy and determination.  For this winter, at any rate, he would hunt and do a little shooting, entertain a few of his neighbours and make friends with any congenial fellow-sportsmen who might be within reach.  Next year things would be different; he would have had time to look round him, to regain something of his aforetime vigour of mind and body.  Next year, when the hunting season was over, he would set about finding out whether there was any nobler game for him to take a hand in.  He would enter into correspondence with old friends who had gone out into the tropics and the backwoods—­he would do something.