cottage.’  The major of course declared that he was not at all tired, and that he should be delighted of all things to go up and see old Flurry, and thus they started.  Young Grantly had not even been into the house before he left the yard with his father.  Of course, he was thinking of the coming sale at Cosby Lodge, and of his future life at Pau, and of his injured position in the world.  There would be no longer any occasion for him to be solicitous as to the Plumstead foxes.  Of course these things were in his mind; but he could not begin to speak of them till his father did so.  ’I’m afraid your grandfather is not very strong,’ said the archdeacon, shaking his head.  ’I fear he won’t be with us very long.’

‘Is it so bad as that?’

’Well, you know, he is an old man, Henry; and he was always somewhat old for his age.  He will be eighty, if he lives two years longer, I think.  But he’ll never reach eighty;—­never.  You must go and see him before you go back home; you must indeed.’  The major, of course, promised that he would see his grandfather, and the archdeacon told his son how nearly the old man had fallen in the passage between the cathedral and the deanery.  In this way they had nearly made their way up to the gamekeeper’s cottage without a word of reference to any subject that touched upon the matter of which each of them was of course thinking.  Whether the major intended to remain at home or to live at Pau, the subject of Mr Harding’s health was a natural topic for conversation between him and his father; but when his father stopped suddenly, and began to tell him how a fox had been trapped on Darvell’s farm—­’and of course it was a Plumstead fox—­there can be no doubt that Flurry is right about that’;—­when the archdeacon spoke of this iniquity with much warmth, and told his son how he had at once written off to Mr Thorne of Ullathorne, and how Mr Thorne had declared that he didn’t believe a word of it, and how Flurry had produced the pad of the fox, with the marks of the trap on the skin—­then the son began to feel that the ground was becoming very warm, and that he could not go on much longer without rushing into details about Grace Crawley.  ’I’ve no more doubt that it was one of our foxes than that I stand here,’ said the archdeacon.

’It doesn’t matter where the fox was bred.  It shouldn’t have been trapped,’ said the major.

‘Of course not,’ said the archdeacon, indignantly.  I wonder whether he would have been so keen had a Romanist priest come into his parish and turned one of his Protestants into a Papist?

Then Flurry came up, and produced the identical pad out of his pocket.  ‘I don’t suppose it was intended,’ said the major, looking at the interesting relic with scrutinising eyes.  ’I suppose it was caught in a rabbit-trap, eh, Flurry?’

’I don’t see what right a man has with traps at all, when gentlemen is particular about their foxes,’ said Flurry.  ’Of course they’d call it rabbits.’