Judith had been induced to close her brilliant career as a buccaneer, by a perfectly, even—­from the buccaneering point of view—­depressingly satisfactory marriage with Mr. William Kirby, and her departure had forced her younger sister into the front rank of domestic combatants.  At Mount Music, where once the milk and honey had flowed with effortless abundance, each year brought increasing stress.  The rents grew less, the expenses greater, that large and omnivorous item, known as “keeping up the place,” was as exacting as ever, the minor problems of household existence more acute.  There had been a time when the Mount Music tenants had vied with one another in the provision of sons and daughters for service in the Big House, when bonfires had blazed for the return of “the young gentlemen,” and offerings of eggs had greeted “the young ladies.”  Now the propitiatory turkey that heralded a request, the goose that signalised a success, gained with the help of the hereditary helpers, had all ceased.  Alien influences had poisoned the wells of friendship.  Such rents as were paid were extracted by the hard hand of the law, and the tenants held indignation meetings against the landlord who refused to resign to them what they believed to be theirs, and he was equally convinced was his.  Major Dick still shot and fished, as was his right, over the lands and waters that were still in his name, but the tenants, whose fathers had loved him, had renounced the old allegiance.  The partridges were run down by the greyhounds that had killed off the hares; the salmon were poached; worst of all, Derrylugga Gorse, the covert that Dick had planted twenty-five years ago, on Carmody’s farm, in the middle of the best of the Broadwater Vale country, was burned down, and a vixen and her cubs had perished with it.

Dick gave up the hounds at the end of the season.

“I’ve done my best to show sport for five and twenty years,” he said, “and I’m not going to spoil it now!”

It is impossible to deny that for Dick’s wife this sacrifice had its consolatory aspects.  It was a long time now since there had been quite enough money for anything at Mount Music.  Those far-sighted guardian angels who had compelled the investment of Lady Isabel’s dowry in gilt-edged securities, had placed the care of these in the hands of hide-bound English trustees (the definition is Major Dick’s) and the amiable reader need therefore have no anxieties that starvation threatened this well-meaning family, but, as Lady Isabel frequently said, “what with the Boys, and Judith’s trousseau, and the Wedding, and One-Thing-and-Another” (which last is always a big item in the domestic budget) the more common needs of every day had to submit to very drastic condensation, and it was indisputable that the Talbot-Lowry family-coach was running on the down-grade.