“I don’t want the cake.  I only want some biscuits, please.  Dixie, and hurry!  Amazon’s bolted, and Cottingham’s asked me to catch her!  If you had a bone, Dixie, she’d simply—­”

Mrs. Dixon was gone.  She disapproved exceedingly of Christian’s role as kennel-boy, but as, since Christian’s first birthday, she had never refused her anything, she was not prepared on her tenth to break so well-established a habit.

“I dunno in the world why Mr. Cottingham should make a young lady like you do his business!” she said, putting the requisition bait into Christian’s eager, up-stretched hands, “and if your Mamma could see you—­”

“Oh, well done, Dixie!  What a lovely bone!  Oh, thank you most awfully!” interrupted Christian, snatching at the dainties provided, and flitting away through the grey veils of the rain, a preposterous little figure, clad in a ragged kennel-coat, that had been long since discarded by the huntsman, a pair of couples slung round her neck, and a crop in her hand.

It was a chilly, wet August afternoon.  It had rained for the past three days, and was, by all appearances, prepared to continue to do so for three more.  Christian ran across the fields to the kennels, regardless of wet overhead or underfoot, and oblivious of the corked moustache, which ran too, almost as fast as she did.  She had made a detour to avoid the schoolroom windows.  Her birthday party was toward, and charades (accounting for her moustache) were in full swing.  But the message from Cottingham, secretly conveyed together with the couples, by the pantry boy, transcended in importance all other human affairs.  She had slipped away from her fellows, and having endured the hunting cap and the kennel coat, as the wear suitable to such an occasion, she had not lost a minute in coming to the horn.

Cottingham, Major Talbot-Lowry’s First Whip and kennel huntsman, a single-souled little Devonshire man, whose dyed hair was the solitary indication of the age it was intended to conceal, awaited her outside the kennels.

“Well, Missie, I knew you’d come,” he said, approvingly.  “It’s Amazon that’s away—­that little badger-pye bitch we got last week—­I ’ad to give ’er a bit of a ’iding—­she tried to run a sheep when we was walkin’ out last evening—­she’s a revengeful sort, she is, and very artful, and when we gets near kennels, her took an’ bolted past Jimmy over the ‘ill, an’ I says to Jimmy, ‘Why you fool’ I says—­”

The tale continued at length, and with those repetitions and recapitulations peculiar to the simple, but by no means short annals of the poor, and especially of the English poor.  Yet, Christian, the impatient, the ardent, stood and listened with respectful and absorbed interest.  Cottingham might be elderly, egotistic, long-winded, but at this period of her career, Christian’s hot heart beat throb for throb with his, and the thought, as he said, of “that pore little bitch stoppin’ out, and maybe spoilt, so that there’d be nothin’ for us but to shoot her, through learnin’ to run sheep,” had precisely the same horror for her as for him.