The Bannister carriage had scarcely left the Cobhurst gates when the dog, Congo, came bounding after it.  Dora looked at him as his great brown eyes were turned up towards her, and his tail was wagging with the joy of following her once more, she knew that his training was so good that she had only to tell him to go back and he would obey her, sorrowfully, with his tail hanging down.  He was Ralph’s dog now, and she ought to send him back, but would she?  She looked at him for a few moments, considering the question, and then she said,—­

“Come, Congo” and with a bound he was in the carriage and at her feet.  “You were not an out and out gift, poor fellow,” she said, stroking his head.  “I expected you to be partly my dog, all the same, and now we will see if she will let him claim you.”

The dog heard all this, but Dora spoke so low, the coachman could not hear it, and she did not intend that any one else should know it unless the dog told.

Ralph did not miss Congo until the next morning, and then, having become convinced that the dog must have followed the Bannister carriage, he expressed, in the presence of Cicely, his uncertainty as to whether it would be better for him to go after the dog himself, or to send Mike.

“If I were you,” said Miss Cicely, “I would not send for him at all.  If Miss Bannister really wants to get rid of him, and does not know anybody else who would take him, she may send him back herself.  But it seems to me that a setter is not the best sort of a dog for a farm like this.  I should think you ought to have a big mastiff, or something of that sort.”

“It is a great pity,” said Ralph, musingly, “that he happened to be unchained.”

“The more I think about it,” said Cicely, “the less I like setters.  They are so intimately connected with the death of the beautiful.  Did you ever think of that?”

Ralph never had, and as a man now came up to talk to him about hay, the dog and everything connected with it passed out of his mind.

When Miss Panney reached home after her abrupt parting from Dora Bannister, she took a dose of the last medicine that Dr. Tolbridge had prescribed for her.  It was against her rules to use internal medicines, but she made exceptions on important occasions, and as this was a remedy for the effects of anger, she had taken it before and she took it now.  Then she went to bed and there she stayed until three o’clock the next afternoon.  This greatly disturbed the Wittons, for they had always believed that this hearty old lady would not be carried off by any disease, but when her time had come would simply take to her bed and die there, after the manner of elderly animals.

About the middle of the afternoon Mrs. Witton came up into her room.  She did not do this often, for the old lady had always made everybody in the house understand that this room was her castle, and when any one was wanted there, he or she would be summoned.