notes of the horn over the meadows. The casual
cruelty of the words awoke no protest in her mind, because it was a
cruelty to which she was accustomed. If the sport had been unknown in
Dinwiddie, and she had read of it as the peculiar activity of the
inhabitants of the British Islands, she would probably have condemned it
as needlessly brutal and degrading. But with that universal faculty of
the human mind to adjust its morality to fit its inherited physical
habits, she regarded "the rights of the fox" to-day with something of
the humorous scorn of sentimental rubbish with which her gentler
grandmother had once regarded "the rights of the slave." For centuries
the hunt had been one of the cherished customs of Dinwiddians; and
though she could not bear to see a fly caught in a web, it would never
have occurred to her to question the humanity of any sport in which her
ancestors had delighted. In her girlhood the sound of the horn had
called to her blood with all the intoxicating associations it awoke in
the raw-boned, energetic rider in the plum-coloured coat--but to-day
both the horn and the familiar landscape around her had grown strange
and unhomelike. For the first time since her birth she and the country
were out of harmony.

In the midst of the hounds, in the centre of the old field on the right,
the huntsman, who was at the same time master and owner of the dogs,
brandished a long raw-hide whip, flexible from the handle, which was
pleasantly known in Dinwiddie as a "mule-skinner." His face, burned to
the colour of ripe wheat, wore a rapt and exalted look, as though the
chasing of a small animal to its death had called forth his latent
spiritual ardours. Beyond him, like a low, smouldering fire, ran the red
and gold of the abandoned field.

"Please be careful, Virginia," said Oliver again, as they left the road
and cantered in the direction of a clump of pine woods in a hollow
beyond a rotting "snake" fence.

But she had seen his eyes on Abby a minute before, and had heard his
laugh as he answered her. A wave of recklessness broke over her, and she
felt that she despised fear with all her Pendleton blood, which loved a
fight only less passionately than it loved a sermon. Whatever
happened--if she broke her neck--she resolved that she would keep up
with Abby! With the drumming of the blood in her ears, an almost savage
joy awoke in her. Deep down in her, so deep that it was buried beneath
the Virginia Pendleton w