“Hit it!” said the captain, looking ruefully at his hat.  “It looks like a cullender; but, Moseley, your gun don’t scatter well:  a dozen shot have gone through in the same place.”

“It does look rather like a cullender,” said John, as he overlooked his companion’s beaver, “and, by the size of some of the holes, one that has been a good deal used.”

The reports of the fowling-pieces announced to the party in the arbor the return of the sportsmen, it being an invariable practice with John Moseley to discharge his gun before he came in; and Jarvis had imitated him, from a wish to be what he called in rule.

“Mr. Denbigh,” said John, as he put down his gun, “Captain Jarvis has got the better of his hat at last.”

Denbigh smiled without speaking; and the captain, unwilling to have anything to say to a gentleman to whom be had been obliged to apologize, went into the arbor to show the mangled condition of his head-piece to the colonel, on whose sympathies he felt a kind of claim, being of the same corps.  John complained of thirst, and went to a little run of water but a short distance from them, in order to satisfy it.  The interruption of Jarvis was particularly unseasonable.  Jane was relating, in a manner peculiar to herself, in which was mingled that undefinable exchange of looks lovers are so fond of, some incident of her early life to the colonel that greatly interested him.  Knowing the captain’s foibles, he pointed, therefore, with his finger, as he said—­

“There is one of your old enemies, a hawk.”

Jarvis threw down his hat, and ran with boyish eagerness to drive away the intruder.  In his haste, he caught up the gun of John Moseley, and loading it rapidly/threw in a ball from his usual stock; but whether the hawk saw and knew him, or whether it saw something else it liked better, it made a dart for the baronet’s poultry-yard at no great distance, and was out of sight in a minute.  Seeing that his foe had vanished, the captain laid the piece where he had found it, and, recovering his old train of ideas, picked up his hat again.

“John,” said Emily, as she approached him affectionately, “you were too warm to drink.”

“Stand off, sis,” cried John, playfully, taking up the gun from against the body of the tree, and dropping it towards her.

Jarvis had endeavored to make an appeal to the commiseration of Emily in favor of the neglected beaver, and was within a few feet of them.  At this moment, recoiling from the muzzle of the gun, he exclaimed, “It is loaded!” “Hold,” cried Denbigh, in a voice of horror, as he sprang between John and his sister.  Both were too late; the piece was discharged.  Denbigh, turning to Emily, and smiling mournfully, gazed for a moment at her with an expression of tenderness, of pleasure, of sorrow, so blended that she retained the recollection of it for life, and fell at her feet.