At the close of lunch she found herself somehow sitting on a small rock beside Dick.  Lord Talgarth was twenty yards away, his gaitered legs very wide apart, surveying the country and talking to the keeper.  Her father was looking down the barrels of his rather ineffective gun, and Archie, with three or four other men and two women, a wife and a sister, was smoking with his back against a rock.

“Shall you be in to-morrow?” asked Dick casually.

Jenny paused an instant.

“I should think so!” she said.  “I’ve got one or two things to do.”

“Perhaps I may look in?  I want to talk to you about something if I may.”

“Shan’t you be shooting again?”

“No; I’m not very fit and shall take a rest.”

Jenny was silent.

“About what time?” pursued Dick.

Jenny roused herself with a little start.  She had been staring out over the hills and wondering if that was the church above Barham that she could almost see against the horizon.

“Oh! any time up to lunch,” she said vaguely.

Dick stood up slowly with a satisfied air and stretched himself.  He looked very complete and trim, thought Jenny, from his flat cap to his beautifully-spatted shooting-boots. (It was twelve hundred a year, at least, wasn’t it?)

“Well, I suppose we shall be moving directly,” he said.

* * * * *

A beater came up bringing the mare just before the start was made.

“All right, you can leave her,” said Jenny.  “I won’t mount yet.  Just hitch the bridle on to something.”

It was a pleasant and picturesque sight to see the beaters, like a file of medieval huntsmen, dwindle down the hill in their green and silver in one direction, and, five minutes later, the sportsmen in another.  It looked like some mysterious military maneuver on a small scale; and again Jenny considered the illusion of free choice enjoyed by the grouse, who, perhaps, two miles away, crouched in hollows among the heather.  And yet, practically speaking, there was hardly any choice at all....

Lady Richard, the wife of one of the men, interrupted her in a drawl.

“Looks jolly, doesn’t it?” she said.

Jenny assented cordially.

(She hated this woman, somehow, without knowing why.  She said to herself it was the drawl and the insolent cold eyes and the astonishing complacency; and she only half acknowledged that it was the beautiful lines of the dress and the figure and the assured social position.)

“We’re driving,” went on the tall girl.  “You rode, didn’t you?

“Yes.”

“Lord Talgarth’s mare, isn’t it?  I thought I recognized her.”

“Yes.  I haven’t got a horse of my own, you know,” said Jenny deliberately.

“Oh!”

Jenny suddenly felt her hatred rise almost to passion.

“I must be going,” she said.  “I’ve got to visit an old woman who’s dying.  A rector’s daughter, you know—­”