with that handling she could be sold at a profit.  And besides, the hunt was a quiet, intimate, kindly little hunt, not anxious for strangers, of good report in the Field, the servant of one M.F.H., given to hospitality, riding well its own horses, and, with the exception of Midmore, not novices.  But as Miss Sperrit observed, after the M.F.H. had said some things to him at a gate:  ’It is a pity you don’t know as much as your horse, but you will in time.  It takes years and yee-ars.  I’ve been at it for fifteen and I’m only just learning.  But you’ve made a decent kick-off.’

So he kicked off in wind and wet and mud, wondering quite sincerely why the bubbling ditches and sucking pastures held him from day to day, or what so-lace he could find on off days in chasing grooms and brick-layers round outhouses.

To make sure he up-rooted himself one week-end of heavy mid-winter rain, and re-entered his lost world in the character of Galahad fresh from a rest-cure.  They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying.  His three months’ absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field.  The movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed.  The couples had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles, whereby he put his foot in it badly.  Only one great soul (he who had written the account of the pig-pound episode) stood untouched by the vast flux of time, and Midmore lent him another fiver for his integrity.  A woman took him, in the wet forenoon, to a pronouncement on the Oneness of Impulse in Humanity, which struck him as a polysyllabic resume of Mr. Sidney’s domestic arrangements, plus a clarion call to ’shock civilisation into common-sense.’

‘And you’ll come to tea with me to-morrow?’ she asked, after lunch, nibbling cashew nuts from a saucer.  Midmore replied that there were great arrears of work to overtake when a man had been put away for so long.

’But you’ve come back like a giant refreshed....  I hope that Daphne’—­this was the lady of the twelve and the eight-page letter—­’will be with us too.  She has misunderstood herself, like so many of us,’ the woman murmured, ‘but I think eventually ...’ she flung out her thin little hands.  ’However, these are things that each lonely soul must adjust for itself.’

‘Indeed, yes,’ said Midmore with a deep sigh.  The old tricks were sprouting in the old atmosphere like mushrooms in a dung-pit.  He passed into an abrupt reverie, shook his head, as though stung by tumultuous memories, and departed without any ceremony of farewell to—­catch a mid-afternoon express where a man meets associates who talk horse, and weather as it affects the horse, all the way down.  What worried him most was that he had missed a day with the hounds.