hungry.  A cheery fire burned in his dressing-room and a lively black kitten helped him to dress, and incidentally helped him to require a new tassel to the cord of his dressing-gown.  As he finished his toilet and the kitten finished its sixth and most notable attack on the tassel a ring was heard at the front door, and a moment later a loud, hearty, and unmistakably hungry voice resounded in the hall.  It belonged to the local doctor, who had also taken part in the day’s run and had been bidden to enliven the evening meal with the entertainment of his inexhaustible store of sporting and social reminiscences.  He knew the countryside and the countryfolk inside out, and he was a living unwritten chronicle of the East Wessex hunt.  His conversation seemed exactly the right accompaniment to the meal; his stories brought glimpses of wet hedgerows, stiff ploughlands, leafy spinneys and muddy brooks in among the rich old Worcester and Georgian silver of the dinner service, the glow and crackle of the wood fire, the pleasant succession of well-cooked dishes and mellow wines.  The world narrowed itself down again to a warm, drowsy-scented dining-room, with a productive hinterland of kitchen and cellar beyond it, and beyond that an important outer world of loose box and harness-room and stable-yard; further again a dark hushed region where pheasants roosted and owls flitted and foxes prowled.

Yeovil sat and listened to story after story of the men and women and horses of the neighbourhood; even the foxes seemed to have a personality, some of them, and a personal history.  It was a little like Hans Andersen, he decided, and a little like the Reminiscences of an Irish R.M., and perhaps just a little like some of the more probable adventures of Baron Munchausen.  The newer stories were evidently true to the smallest detail, the earlier ones had altered somewhat in repetition, as plants and animals vary under domestication.

And all the time there was one topic that was never touched on.  Of half the families mentioned it was necessary to add the qualifying information that they “used to live” at such and such a place; the countryside knew them no longer.  Their properties were for sale or had already passed into the hands of strangers.  But neither man cared to allude to the grinning shadow that sat at the feast and sent an icy chill now and again through the cheeriest jest and most jovial story.  The brisk run with the hounds that day had stirred and warmed their pulses; it was an evening for comfortable forgetting.  Later that night, in the stillness of his bedroom, with the dwindling noises of a retiring household dropping off one by one into ordered silence, a door shutting here, a fire being raked out there, the thoughts that had been held away came crowding in.  The body was tired, but the brain was not, and Yeovil lay awake with his thoughts for company.  The world grew suddenly wide again, filled with the significance of things that mattered, held by the actions