There was a bright moon, so that Mr. Tebrick could see the dogs as clearly as could be.  First he shot his wife’s setter dead, and then looked about him for Nelly to give her the other barrel, but he could see her nowhere.  The bitch was clean gone, till, looking to see how she had broken her chain, he found her lying hid in the back of her kennel.  But that trick did not save her, for Mr. Tebrick, after trying to pull her out by her chain and finding it useless—­she would not come,—­thrust the muzzle of his gun into the kennel, pressed it into her body and so shot her.  Afterwards, striking a match, he looked in at her to make certain she was dead.  Then, leaving the dogs as they were, chained up, Mr. Tebrick went indoors again and found the gardener, who had not yet gone home, gave him a month’s wages in lieu of notice and told him he had a job for him yet—­to bury the two dogs and that he should do it that same night.

But by all this going on with so much strangeness and authority on his part, as it seemed to them, the servants were much troubled.  Hearing the shots while he was out in the yard his wife’s old nurse, or Nanny, ran up to the bedroom though she had no business there, and so opening the door saw the poor fox dressed in my lady’s little jacket lying back in the cushions, and in such a reverie of woe that she heard nothing.

Old Nanny, though she was not expecting to find her mistress there, having been told that she was gone that afternoon to London, knew her instantly, and cried out: 

“Oh, my poor precious!  Oh, poor Miss Silvia!  What dreadful change is this?” Then, seeing her mistress start and look at her, she cried out:  “But never fear, my darling, it will all come right, your old Nanny knows you, it will all come right in the end.”

But though she said this she did not care to look again, and kept her eyes turned away so as not to meet the foxy slit ones of her mistress, for that was too much for her.  So she hurried out soon, fearing to be found there by Mr. Tebrick, and who knows, perhaps shot, like the dogs, for knowing the secret.

Mr. Tebrick had all this time gone about paying off his servants and shooting his dogs as if he were in a dream.  Now he fortified himself with two or three glasses of strong whisky and went to bed, taking his vixen into his arms, where he slept soundly.  Whether she did or not is more than I or anybody else can say.

In the morning when he woke up they had the place to themselves, for on his instructions the servants had all left first thing:  Janet and the cook to Oxford, where they would try and find new places, and Nanny going back to the cottage near Tangley, where her son lived, who was the pigman there.