Harry, when he reached the meet, looked about him to watch how he was received.  There are not many more painful things in life than when an honest, gallant young fellow has to look about him in such a frame of mind.  It might have been worse had he deserved to be dropped, some one will say.  Not at all.  A different condition of mind exists then, and a struggle is made to overcome the judgment of men which is not in itself painful.  It is part of the natural battle of life, which does not hurt one at all,—­unless, indeed, the man hate himself for that which has brought upon him the hatred of others.  Repentance is always an agony,—­and should be so.  Without the agony there can be no repentance.  But even then it is hardly so sharp as that feeling of injustice which accompanies the unmeaning look, and dumb faces, and pretended indifference of those who have condemned.

When Harry descended from the gig he found himself close to old Mr. Harkaway, the master of the hounds.  Mr. Harkaway was a gentleman who had been master of these hounds for more than forty years, and had given as much satisfaction as the county could produce.  His hounds, which were his hobby, were perfect.  His horses were good enough for the Hertfordshire lanes and Hertfordshire hedges.  His object was not so much to run a fox as to kill him in obedience to certain rules of the game.  Ever so many hinderances have been created to bar the killing a fox,—­as for instance that you shouldn’t knock him on the head with a brick-bat,—­all of which had to Mr. Harkaway the force of a religion.  The laws of hunting are so many that most men who hunt cannot know them all.  But no law had ever been written, or had become a law by the strength of tradition, which he did not know.

To break them was to him treason.  When a young man broke them he pitied the young man’s ignorance, and endeavored to instruct him after some rough fashion.  When an old man broke them, he regarded him as a fool who should stay at home, or as a traitor who should be dealt with as such.  And with such men he could deal very hardly.  Forty years of reigning had taught him to believe himself to be omnipotent, and he was so in his own hunt.  He was a man who had never much affected social habits.  The company of one or two brother sportsmen to drink a glass of port-wine with him and then to go early to bed, was the most of it.  He had a small library, but not a book ever came off the shelf unless it referred to farriers or the res venatica.  He was unmarried.  The time which other men gave to their wives and families he bestowed upon his hounds.  To his stables he never went, looking on a horse as a necessary adjunct to hunting,—­expensive, disagreeable, and prone to get you into danger.  When anyone flattered him about his horse he would only grunt, and turn his head on one side.  No one in these latter years had seen him jump any fence.  But yet he was always with his hounds, and when any one said a kind word