master was asleep, and the housekeeper had not yet come to
cook the dinner. He read slowly, through spectacles, engraving the words
for ever on the tablets of his mind. He read about the construction and
habits of the owl: "In the tawny, or brown, owl there is a manubrial
process; the furcula, far from being joined to the keel of the sternum,
consists of two stylets, which do not even meet; while the posterior
margin of the sternum presents two pairs of projections, with
corresponding fissures between." The old manservant paused, resting his
blinking eyes on the pale sunlight through the bars of his narrow window,
so that a little bird on the window-sill looked at him and instantly flew
away.

The old manservant read on again: "The pterylological characters of
Photodilus seem not to have been investigated, but it has been found to
want the tarsal loop, as well as the manubrial process, while its
clavicles are not joined in a furcula, nor do they meet the keel, and the
posterior margin of the sternum has processes and fissures like the tawny
section." Again he paused, and his gaze was satisfied and bland.

Up in the little smoking-room in a leather chair his master sat asleep.
In front of him were stretched his legs in dusty riding-boots. His lips
were closed, but through a little hole at one corner came a tiny puffing
sound. On the floor by his side was an empty glass, between his feet a
Spanish bulldog. On a shelf above his head reposed some frayed and
yellow novels with sporting titles, written by persons in their
inattentive moments. Over the chimneypiece presided the portrait of Mr.
Jorrocks persuading his horse to cross a stream.

And the face of Jaspar Bellew asleep was the face of a man who has ridden
far, to get away from himself, and to-morrow will have to ride far again.
His sandy eyebrows twitched with his dreams against the dead-white,
freckled skin above high cheekbones, and two hard ridges were fixed
between his brows; now and then over the sleeping face came the look of
one riding at a gate.

In the stables behind the house she who had carried him on his ride,
having rummaged out her last grains of corn, lifted her nose and poked it
through the bars of her loosebox to see what he was doing who had not
carried her master that sweltering afternoon, and seeing that he was
awake, she snorted lightly, to tell him there was thunder in the air.
All else in the stables was deadly quiet; the shrubberie