“It will be a day of misery for me!” replied John, laughing; “but I daresay I shall live through it.”

“I think you will like it very much,” said Kitty.  “There will be a lot of pretty girls here:  the Misses Green are coming from Worthing; the eldest is such a pretty girl, you are sure to admire her.  And the hounds and horses look so beautiful.”

Mrs Norton and Kitty spoke daily of invitations, and later on of cooking and the various things that were wanted.  John continued to go through his accounts in the morning, and to read monkish Latin in the evening; but he was secretly nervous, and he dreaded the approaching day.

He was called an hour earlier—­eight o’clock; he drank a cup of cold tea and ate a piece of dry toast in a back room.  The dining-room was full of servants, who laid out a long table rich with comestibles and glittering with glass.  Mrs Norton and Kitty were upstairs dressing.

He wandered into the drawing-room and viewed the dead, cumbrous furniture; the two cabinets bright with brass and veneer.  He stood at the window staring.  It was raining.  The yellow of the falling leaves was hidden in the grey mist.  It ceased to rain.  “This weather will keep many away; so much the better; there will be too many as it is.  I wonder who this can be.”  A melancholy brougham passed up the drive.  There were three old maids, all looking sweetly alike; one was a cripple who walked with crutches, and her smile was the best and the gayest imaginable smile.

“How little material welfare has to do with our happiness,” thought John.  “There is one whose path is the narrowest, and she is happier and better than I.”  And then the three sweet old maids talked with their cousin of the weather; and they all wondered—­a sweet feminine wonderment—­if he would see a girl that day whom he would marry.

Presently the house was full of people.  The passage was full of girls; a few men sat at breakfast at the end of the long table.  Some red coats passed across the green glare of the park, and the hounds trotted about a single horseman.  Voices.  “Oh! how sweet they look! oh, the dear dogs!” The huntsman stopped in front of the house, the hounds sniffed here and there, the whips trotted their horses and drove them back.  “Get together, get together; get back there; Woodland, Beauty, come up here.”  The hounds rolled on the grass, and leaned their fore-paws on the railings, willing to be caressed.

“How sweet they are, look at their soft eyes,” cried an old lady whose deity was a pug, and whose back garden reeked of the tropics.  “Look how good and kind they are; they would not hurt anything; it is only wicked men who teach them to be ...”  The old lady hesitated before the word “bad,” and murmured something about killing.