matters,
and found it impossible to conceive a state of affairs when he would
be unable to do--approximately--whatever he had a mind for. At the age
of fifty-eight, fortitude and endurance are something of a difficulty
for a gentleman unused to the exercise of either of these fine
qualities, and after keeping the Broadwater Vale Hounds, for seventeen
years, as hounds should be kept, regardless of the caprices of the
subscription list, Major-Talbot-Lowry felt that he had deserved better
of his country than that he should now have to institute minor
economies, such as putting his men into brown breeches, foregoing the
yearly renewal of their scarlet coats, and other like humiliations.
Farther than details such as these, his sense of right and wrong did
not permit him to go.

"There are some things that they can't expect a gentleman to do," he
would say to his cousin, Miss Coppinger, "and as long as I keep the
hounds--"

"Then, my dear Dick, if you can't afford them, why keep them?"
Frederica would rejoin, with unsparing common-sense.

Unmarried ladies of mature age, have, as a rule, learned not only
fortitude and endurance, but have also mastered the fact that ways are
governed by means. Those processes of erosion, however, to which
reference has been made, were, comparatively speaking, slow in
operation, and there remained always Lady Isabel's twenty thousand
golden sovereigns, as safe and secluded in the hands of trustees (who
had a constitutional disbelief in Irishmen), as if they were twenty
thousand nuns under the rule of a royal abbess.

Therefore did Major Talbot-Lowry, M.F.H., and the Broadwater Vale
Hounds, make a creditable show, brown breeches and last season's pink
coats notwithstanding, at the meet at Coppinger's Court, on December
26th of the year 1897. The weather was grey and silver, with a light
southeast wind and a rising glass. Sunshine was filtering down, as it
were through muslin curtains that might at any moment be withdrawn;
some crocuses and snowdrops had appeared in the grass round the wide
gravel sweep in front of the house; there was a perplexed primrose or
two, deceived by the sun as to the date; the scent of the violets in
the bed under the drawing-room windows, came in delicate whiffs round
the corner of the house. It would have been impossible to believe that
but twenty-four hours ago, Christmas hymns had been shouted, and
Christmas presents presented, had not a group of "Wran-boys" of