“That means her husband, too,” grumbled Scott, “and that entire bunch.”

“No; if it’s a shooting party, I don’t have to ask him.”

Her brother said ungraciously:  “Well, I don’t care who you ask if they’ll thin out these cheeky brutes.  Fancy that two-year-old pig clattering his tusks at me, planted there in the path with his mane on end!—­You know it mortifies me, Kathleen—­it certainly does.  One of these fine days some facetious pig will send me shinning up a tree!” He grew madder at the speculative indignity.  “By ginger!  I’m going to have a shooting party before the snow flies,” he muttered, walking forward between Kathleen and his sister.  “Keep your eyes out ahead; we may jump another at any time, as the wind is all right.  And if we do, let him have it, Geraldine!”

It was a beautiful woodland through which they moved.

The late autumn foliage was unusually magnificent, lacking, this year, those garish and discordant hues which Americans think it necessary to admire.  Oak brown and elm yellow, deep chrome bronze and sombre crimson the hard woods glowed against backgrounds of pine and hemlock.  Larches were mossy cones of feathery gold; birches slim shafts of snowy gray, ochre-crowned; silver and green the balsams’ spires pierced the canopy of splendid tapestry upborne by ash and oak and towering pine under a sky of blue so deep and intense that the lakes reflecting it seemed no less vivid.

Already in the brooks they passed painted trout hung low over every bed of gravel and white sand; the male trout wore his best scarlet fins, and his sides glowed in alternate patterns, jewelled with ruby and sapphire spots.  Already the ruffed grouse thundered up by coveys, though they had not yet packed, for the broods still retained their autonomy.

But somewhere beyond the royal azure of the northern sky, very, very far away, there was cold in the world, for even last week, through the violet and primrose dusk, out of the north, shadowy winged things came speeding, batlike phantoms against the dying light—­flight-woodcock coming through hill-cleft and valley to the land where summer lingered still.

And there in mid-forest, right in the tall timber, Scott, advancing, flushed a woodcock, which darted up, filling the forest with twittering music—­the truest music of our eastern autumn, clear, bewildering, charming in its evanescent sweetness which leaves in its wake a startling silence.

Ahead, lining both sides of a gully deep with last year’s leaves, was an oak grove in mid-forest.  Here the brown earth was usually furrowed by the black snouts of wild boar, for mast lay thick here in autumn and tender roots invited investigation.

“Get down flat and crawl,” whispered Scott; “there may be a boar or two on the grounds.”

Kathleen, in her pretty white gown of lace and some sheer stuff, looked at him piteously; but when he and Geraldine dropped flat and wriggled forward into the wind, misgiving of what might prowl behind seized her, and she tucked up her skirts and gave herself to the brown earth with a tremor of indignation and despair.