han I does of him. ---- him, Mr. Knox."

And then Mr. Price used some very strong language indeed. "What right
has he to think as I'm going to do his dirty work? You may tell him
from me as he may do his own."

"You'll answer him, Price?"

"Not a line. I ain't got nothing to say to him. He knows I'm a-going
out of the house; and if he don't, you can tell him."

"Where are you going to?"

"Well, I was going to fit up a room or two in the old farmhouse; and if
I had anything like a lease, I wouldn't mind spending three or four
hundred pounds there. I was thinking of talking to you about it, Mr.
Knox."

"I can't renew the lease without his approval."

"You write and ask him, and mind you tell him that there ain't no doubt
at all as to any going out of Cross Hall after Christmas. Then, if
he'll make it fourteen years, I'll put the old house up and not ask him
for a shilling. As I'm a living sinner, they're on a fox! Who'd have
thought of that in the park? That's the old vixen from the holt, as
sure as my name's Price. Them cubs haven't travelled here yet."

So saying, he rode away, and Mr. Knox rode after him, and there was
consternation throughout the hunt. It was so unaccustomed a thing to
have to gallop across Manor Cross Park! But the hounds were in full
cry, through the laurels, and into the shrubbery, and round the
conservatory, close up to the house. Then she got into the
kitchen-garden, and back again through the laurels. The butler and the
gardener and the housemaid and the scullery-maid were all there to see.
Even Lady Sarah came to the front door, looking very severe, and the
old Marchioness gaped out of her own sitting-room window upstairs. Our
friend Mary thought it excellent fun, for she was really able to ride
to the hounds; and even Lady Amelia became excited as she flogged the
pony along the road. Stupid old vixen, who ought to have known better!
Price was quite right, for it was she, and the cubs in the holt were
now finally emancipated from all maternal thraldom. She was killed
ignominiously in the stokehole under the greenhouse,--she who had been
the mother of four litters, and who had baffled the Brotherton hounds
half a dozen times over the cream of the Brotherton country!

"I knew it," said Price in a melancholy tone, as he held up the head
which the huntsman had just dissevered from the body. "She might 'a
done better with herself than come to such a place as this for the last
move."

"I