‘Wire be damned!  I had it all out a fortnight ago.  Come on!’ This was Midmore, buffeting into it a little lower down.

‘I knew that!’ Connie cried over her shoulder, and she flitted across the open pasture, humming to herself.

’Oh, of course!  If some people have private information, they can afford to thrust.’  This was a snuff-coloured habit into which Miss Sperrit had cannoned down the ride.

’What!  ‘Midmore got Sidney to heel? You never did that, Sperrit.’  This was Mr. Fisher, M.F.H., enlarging the breach Midmore had made.

‘No, confound him!’ said the father testily.  ’Go on, sir! Injecto ter pulvere—­you’ve kicked half the ditch into my eye already.’

They killed that cub a little short of the haven his mother had told him to make for—­a two-acre Alsatia of a gorse-patch to which the M.F.H. had been denied access for the last fifteen seasons.  He expressed his gratitude before all the field and Mr. Sidney, at Mr. Sidney’s farm-house door.

‘And if there should be any poultry claims—­’ he went on.

‘There won’t be,’ said Midmore.  ’It’s too like cheating a sucking child, isn’t it, Mr. Sidney?’

‘You’ve got me!’ was all the reply.  ‘I be used to bein’ put upon, but you’ve got me, Mus’ Midmore.’

Midmore pointed to a new brick pig-pound built in strict disregard of the terms of the life-tenant’s lease.  The gesture told the tale to the few who did not know, and they shouted.

Such pagan delights as these were followed by pagan sloth of evenings when men and women elsewhere are at their brightest.  But Midmore preferred to lie out on a yellow silk couch, reading works of a debasing vulgarity; or, by invitation, to dine with the Sperrits and savages of their kidney.  These did not expect flights of fancy or phrasing.  They lied, except about horses, grudgingly and of necessity, not for art’s sake; and, men and women alike, they expressed themselves along their chosen lines with the serene indifference of the larger animals.  Then Midmore would go home and identify them, one by one, out of the natural-history books by Mr. Surtees, on the table beside the sofa.  At first they looked upon him coolly, but when the tale of the removed wire and the recaptured gorse had gone the rounds, they accepted him for a person willing to play their games.  True, a faction suspended judgment for a while, because they shot, and hoped that Midmore would serve the glorious mammon of pheasant-raising rather than the unkempt god of fox-hunting.  But after he had shown his choice, they did not ask by what intellectual process he had arrived at it.  He hunted three, sometimes four, times a week, which necessitated not only one bay gelding (L94:  10s.), but a mannerly white-stockinged chestnut (L114), and a black mare, rather long in the back but with a mouth of silk (L150), who so evidently preferred to carry a lady that it would have been cruel to have baulked her.  Besides,