as
the pack came up in full cry.

"Blown already, youngsters?" asked Cresswell. "Better go home."

"We're not blown at all," said Dick, trotting on abreast of the whipper-
in; "Coote's lace came undone, that was all."

"Yes; we should have been in the next field if it hadn't," said the
owner of the luckless lace.

The Harriers smiled, and for a minute or two the pack swung in an even
line across the field.

Then Coote, anxious not to crowd anyone, let half a dozen or so of the
Fifth go in front; and Dick and Georgie, generously considering that it
would be rather low to leave their short-winded comrade in the lurch,
dropped behind the leading rank in order to be nearer him.

In a minute more all anxiety Coote may have felt as to crowding any one
was at an end. He was a yard or two in the rear of the last man, with a
stitch in his side, beginning in his inmost soul to wonder whether the
new "Sociables" Club was such a very good thing after all.

Dick and Georgie, as they gradually sacrificed their prospect of being
in at the death, and fell back to the support of their ally, waxed very
contemptuous of stitch in a fellow's side. They knew what it meant. It
was a pity Coote had started if he was liable to that sort of thing.
His stitch had cost the "Firm" a whole field already. However, they
were not selfish; they must back him up even if it meant coming in at
the tail of the hunt; though, to be sure, the pace Mansfield, Cresswell,
and a few others were going at was one which couldn't be kept up, and
the "Firm," as soon as the stitch was out, might be in the running after
all.

By dint of persuasions, threats, and imputations, Coote's stitch did
come out; but before it was gone the last of the pack were seen going
over the ridge.

"We're out of it," said Georgie, despondently.

"Not a bit of it," said Dick, who was getting his second wind and felt
like holding on. "We're bound to pull up on them if Coote only keeps
up."

So they held on gallantly.

They could not long keep up the fiction of being in the hunt. No amount
of self-deception could persuade them, when the end of the straggling
line of fellows going up the ridge was a clear half-mile ahead, that
they were in it. Still every minute they held on they felt more like
staying, and when they reflected that it was possible to run through the
hunt without being in at the death, they took comfort, and determined
Templeton should not say they had tu