this time, as though the fox despaired of finding refuge among the high places of heather and rock.  Larry had lost his bearings; his eyes on the hounds, his thoughts on his horse, he had not even tried to place himself.  But as the hounds ran on, south and west, he began to recognise familiar features.  Away there to the south, surely were the trees of Coppinger’s Court; could it be the Mount Music earths for which the fox was heading?  The hounds were running now down hill, through crisp, upland meadows.  Farmhouses began to reappear, thatched and whitewashed, tucked snugly in among low bunches of trees; fences were changing in character; the amber streams ran less fiercely, and found time to loiter in pools and quiet reaches.  The hounds had begun to hunt more slowly, and Larry looked at his watch.

“Forty-five minutes since they left the glen!  Bill’s just about mad enough for the asylum by this time!” he thought “If we could only catch this lad!”

But this particular “lad” was not to gratify young Mr. Coppinger by dying, classically, in the open, “on the top of the ground.”  Five minutes after Larry had taken the time he took it again, this time at the mouth of one of many holes in a sandpit, wherein, as was announced by a country boy, “the lad” had saved himself, with “the dogs snapping at his tail.”

“He earned it well,” said Larry, ungrudgingly, even though the mask that was to have hung so carelessly from his saddle was panting deep and safe in the sandpit, listening warily for a possible eviction notice from the hunt-terrier (left, alas hunting rabbits in the heart of Gloun Kieraun) thanking its own wits for the recollection of the city of refuge.

“Ye’re on the lands of Finnahy now,” said the boy.  “Folly on that way down, and ye’ll meet the road.  That’s the near way.”

“Come on, you, and show it to me,” said Larry.

Amazing were the ramifications of the near way.  The bed of a stream had a share, and a well-trodden path along the wide top of a bank; a brace of wheels had to be trundled out of one gap, a toothless harrow dragged from another.  Then they were on heather again.

“Carry on now,” said the guide, “and ye’ll meet a pat—­”

Larry needed no more leading; he was on the hill above Mount Music, Cnocan an Ceoil Sidhe, and the “pat” that was to meet him was the narrow track that led by the Druid Stone and the Well of the Fairies.

The December afternoon was darkening to its close; the sun had made its farewell appearance, coming forth for a moment, a half-circle of clear flame, above the long grey cloud that barred the head of the valley.  Larry rode past the great grey stone, and hardly turned his eyes toward it.  The hounds, trooping meekly round his horse, went aside to the well, and drank long and thirstily.  He did not wait for them.  He put from his mind the memory of the last time he had seen from that hill-side the sun go down.  Rather he set his thoughts, resolutely, on that other last time, in the library of Mount Music.  And he called up Tishy’s brilliant face, framed in the furs that he had given her, that it might help him to drive away other memories.  He was very fond of Tishy, he told himself; anyway, he was booked to marry her next week.