“Bet you he isn’t dead at all.”

“The deuce you do?  And why?” chorused the table; “when a fellow’s body’s found with all his traps round him!”

“I don’t believe he’s dead,” murmured Kergenven with closed, slumberous eyes.

“But why?  Have you heard anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Why do you say he’s alive, then?”

My lord lifted his brows ever so little.

“I think so, that’s all.”

“But you must have a reason, Ker?”

Badgered into speech, Kergenven drank a little more hock, and dropped out slowly, in the mellowest voice in the world, the following: 

“It don’t follow one has reasons for anything; pray don’t get logical.  Two years ago I was out in a chasse au sanglier, central France; perhaps you don’t know their work?  It’s uncommonly queer.  Break up the Alps into little bits, scatter ’em pell-mell over a great forest, and then set a killing pack to hunt through and through it.  Delightful chance for coming to grief; even odds that if you don’t pitch down a ravine, you’ll get blinded for life by a branch; that if you don’t get flattened under a boulder, you’ll be shot by a twig catching your rifle-trigger.  Uncommonly good sport.”

Exhausted with so lengthened an exposition of the charms of the venerie and the hallali, he stopped, and dropped a walnut into some Regency sherry.

“Hang it, Ker!” cried the Dauphin.  “What’s that to do with Beauty?”

My lord let fall a sleepy glance of surprise and of rebuke from under his black lashes, that said mutely, “Do I, who hate talking, ever talk wide of any point?”

“Why, this,” he murmured.  “He was with us down at Veille-roc—­Louis D’Auvrai’s place, you know; and we were out after an old boar—­not too old to race; but still tough enough to be likely to turn and trust to his tusks if the pace got very hot, and he was hard pressed at the finish.  We hadn’t found till rather late, the limeurs were rather new to the work, and the November day was short, of course; the pack got on the slot of a roebuck too, and were off the boar’s scent in a little while, running wild.  Altogether we got scattered, and in the forest it grew almost as dark as pitch; you followed just as you could, and could only guide yourself by your ear when the hounds gave cry, or the horns sounded.  On you blundered, hit or miss, headlong down the rocks and through the branches; horses warmed wonderfully to the business, scrambled like cats, slid down like otters, kept their footing where nobody’d have thought anything but a goat could stand.  Our hunting bloods wouldn’t live an hour in a French forest.  You see we just look for pace and strength in the shoulders; we don’t much want anything else—­except good jumping power.  What a lot of fellows—­even in the crack packs—­will always funk water!  Horses will fly, but they can’t swim.  Now, to my fancy, a clever beast ought to take even a swelling bit of water like a duck.  How poor Standard breasted rivers till that fool staked him!”