s. Pendyce glanced up at him; there was a touch of quizzicality in one
of her lifted eyebrows.

"I mustn't keep you, dear; you'll be late for the shooting."

Mr. Pendyce, a sportsman of the old school, who still kept pointers,
which, in the teeth of modern fashion, he was unable to employ, set his
face against the use of two guns.

"Any man," he would say, "who cares to shoot at Worsted Skeynes must do
with one gun, as my dear old father had to do before me. He'll get a
good day's sport--no barndoor birds" (for he encouraged his pheasants to
remain lean, that they might fly the better), "but don't let him expect
one of these battues--sheer butchery, I call them."

He was excessively fond of birds--it was, in fact, his hobby, and he had
collected under glass cases a prodigious number of specimens of those
species which are in danger of becoming extinct, having really, in some
Pendycean sort of way, a feeling that by this practice he was doing them
a good turn, championing them, as it were, to a world that would soon be
unable to look upon them in the flesh. He wished, too, that his
collection should become an integral part of the estate, and be passed on
to his son, and his son's son after him.

"Look at this Dartford Warbler," he would say; "beautiful little
creature--getting rarer every day. I had the greatest difficulty in
procuring this specimen. You wouldn't believe me if I told you what I
had to pay for him!"

Some of his unique birds he had shot himself, having in his youth made
expeditions to foreign countries solely with this object, but the great
majority he had been compelled to purchase. In his library were row upon
row of books carefully arranged and bearing on this fascinating subject;
and his collection of rare, almost extinct, birds' eggs was one of the
finest in the "three kingdoms." One egg especially he would point to
with pride as the last obtainable of that particular breed. "This was
procured," he would say, "by my dear old gillie Angus out of the bird's
very nest. There was just the single egg. The species," he added,
tenderly handling the delicate, porcelain-like oval in his brown hand
covered with very fine, blackish hairs, "is now extinct." He was, in
fact, a true bird-lover, strongly condemning cockneys, or rough, ignorant
persons who, with no collections of their own, wantonly destroyed
kingfishers, or scarce birds of any sort, out of pure stupidity. "I would
have them flogged,