Master cared that night. The meeting between Tara and the Mistress
of the Kennels was a spectacle which afforded him real joy. The
flat seemed ridiculously tiny when once Tara was inside it; but,
like all her race, this mother of heroes was a marvel of deftness,
and could walk in and out of the Mistress's little drawing-room
without so much as brushing a chair-leg. There was great rejoicing
in the little flat that night; and a deal of wonderful planning,
too, I make no doubt.

And this was how Tara, the mother of heroes, returned to the
friends who had watched over her birth and early training, and
later motherhood, with every sort of loving care.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II

IN THE BEGINNING

It was little that Tara, the Wolfhound, cared about lack of space,
so that she could stretch her great length along a hearthrug, with
her long, bearded muzzle resting on her friend's slippers, and gaze
at him, while he sat at his work, through the forest of overhanging
eyebrows which screened her soft, brown eyes. And in any case, the
next four months of her life, after the happy meeting at the Show
which restored her to her old friend, were too full of changing
happenings and variety of scene and occupation to leave time for
much consideration about the size of quarters, and matters of that
like.

For one thing, it was within a few days of the show that Tara was
taken on a two days' visit to a farm in Oxfordshire, where she
renewed her old acquaintance with one of the greatest aristocrats
of her race, Champion Dermot Asthore, the father of those great
young hounds she had given to the world during her life with the
Master; the children whose subsequently earned champion honours
reflected glory upon herself as the most famous living mother of
her breed, though not the most famous show dog. The qualities which
win the greatest honour in the show ring are not always the
qualities which make for famous motherhood. As a show hound merely,
Tara might have been beaten by dames of her race who had not half
her splendid width of flank and chest and general massiveness,
though they might have a shade more than her height and raciness.

After that, something considerable seemed to happen pretty well
every day. The Master spoke laughingly of the spring madness that
was as quicksilver to his heels, and of great profit to furniture
removers. He laughed a good deal in those early spring days, and
took Tara and the Mistress