use he could not bear to leave his master for a single
second--the scolding had made him love him so--and partly because of
that new idea, which let him have no peace, he lay in the hall waiting.

Having once in his hot youth inadvertently followed the Squire's horse,
he could never be induced to follow it again. He both personally
disliked this needlessly large and swift form of animal, and suspected it
of designs upon his master; for when the creature had taken his master
up, there was not a smell of him left anywhere--not a whiff of that
pleasant scent that so endeared him to the heart. As soon, therefore, as
the horse appeared, the spaniel John would. lie down on his stomach with
his forepaws close to his nose, and his nose close to the ground; nor
until the animal vanished could he be induced to abandon an attitude in
which he resembled a couching Sphinx.

But this afternoon, with his tail down, his lips pouting, his shoulders
making heavy work of it, his nose lifted in deprecation of that
ridiculous and unnecessary plane on which his master sat, he followed at
a measured distance. In such-wise, aforetime, the village had followed
the Squire and Mr. Barter when they introduced into it its one and only
drain.

Mr. Pendyce rode slowly; his feet, in their well-blacked boots, his
nervous legs in Bedford cord and mahogany-coloured leggings, moved in
rhyme to the horse's trot. A long-tailed coat fell clean and full over
his thighs; his back and shoulders were a wee bit bent to lessen motion,
and above his neat white stock under a grey bowler hat his lean,
grey-whiskered and moustachioed face, with harassed eyes, was preoccupied
and sad. His horse, a brown blood mare, ambled lazily, head raking
forward, and bang tail floating outward from her hocks. And so, in the
June sunshine, they went, all three, along the leafy lane to Worsted
Scotton....

On Tuesday, the day that Mrs. Pendyce had left, the Squire had come in
later than usual, for he felt that after their difference of the night
before, a little coolness would do her no harm. The first hour of
discovery had been as one confused and angry minute, ending in a burst of
nerves and the telegram to General Pendyce. He took the telegram
himself, returning from the village with his head down, a sudden prey to
a feeling of shame--an odd and terrible feeling that he never remembered
to have felt before, a sort of fear of his fellow-creatures. He would
have chosen a