hounds would have drawn off
kennelward and homeward.

Yeovil rode through the deepening twilight, relying chiefly on his horse
to find its way in the network of hedge-bordered lanes that presumably
led to a high road or to some human habitation. He was desperately tired
after his day's hunting, a legacy of weakness that the fever had
bequeathed to him, but even though he could scarcely sit upright in his
saddle his mind dwelt complacently on the day's sport and looked forward
to the snug cheery comfort that awaited him at his hunting box. There
was a charm, too, even for a tired man, in the eerie stillness of the
lone twilight land through which he was passing, a grey shadow-hung land
which seemed to have been emptied of all things that belonged to the
daytime, and filled with a lurking, moving life of which one knew nothing
beyond the sense that it was there. There, and very near. If there had
been wood-gods and wicked-eyed fauns in the sunlit groves and hill sides
of old Hellas, surely there were watchful, living things of kindred mould
in this dusk-hidden wilderness of field and hedge and coppice.

It was Yeovil's third or fourth day with the hounds, without taking into
account a couple of mornings' cub-hunting. Already he felt that he had
been doing nothing different from this all his life. His foreign
travels, his illness, his recent weeks in London, they were part of a
tapestried background that had very slight and distant connection with
his present existence. Of the future he tried to think with greater
energy and determination. For this winter, at any rate, he would hunt
and do a little shooting, entertain a few of his neighbours and make
friends with any congenial fellow-sportsmen who might be within reach.
Next year things would be different; he would have had time to look round
him, to regain something of his aforetime vigour of mind and body. Next
year, when the hunting season was over, he would set about finding out
whether there was any nobler game for him to take a hand in. He would
enter into correspondence with old friends who had gone out into the
tropics and the backwoods--he would do something.

So he told himself, but he knew thoroughly well that he had found his
level. He had ceased to struggle against the fascination of his present
surroundings. The slow, quiet comfort and interest of country life
appealed with enervating force to the man whom death had half conquered.
The pleasures