“But chained, Mr Breen.  And a collie, too!”

“Well, we couldn’t have him messing all over the place; at any rate, my people wouldn’t.  Oh, I assure you, Miss Pennycuick, Bruce is in clover.  He was only baying the moon.  Dogs often do that.  It’s only their fun—­ though it isn’t fun to us.”

“Fun!” sighed Rose helplessly.  And she fixed her eyes upon her companion, as they sat Vis-A-Vis on the edges of their brocaded chairs, with no sense that he was a strange young man—­a gaze that troubled and disconcerted him.  “I am sure,” she answered earnestly, “that you have a kind heart.  One has only to look at you to know it.”

“The idea never occurred to me before,” he mumbled, flattered by her discernment, and no more offended with her.

“I am sure no one could mean better by a dog than you, giving him all those nice things,” she continued.  “But—­but you don’t think.  You don’t try to imagine yourself chained up in one spot night and day, week in and week out, with nothing to do—­no interests, no amusements, unable to get to your work, to go shooting with your friends, to do anything that you were born to do—­and consider how you would like it.”

Mr Peter submitted to her humbly the fact that he was not a dog.

“And you think you are not both made of the same stuff?  That’s just where people make the mistake, even the kindest of them.  Mr Breen, I once had a long talk with the curator of a zoological garden, and he told me that animals in confinement suffer mentally, just as we should do in their place.  Unless they have occupation and companionship they go out of their minds.  They get sullen and savage, and people say they are vicious, and punish them, when it is only misery.  He said no happy dog ever got hydrophobia unless it was bitten; and that it was to save themselves from going mad that squirrels kept whirling their wheel and tigers running round and round their cages.  They want notice, and change, and work, or they cannot bear it.  The stagnation kills them—­ or I wish it did kill them quicker than it does.  Look at your Bruce, born to work sheep, to scamper over miles of country, free as air, to be mates with some man who would know the value of such a friend, and be worthy of him.  Oh, it is too cruel!”

Never had Rose displayed such eloquence, and a sudden glisten in her candid eyes put the piercing climax to it.  Mr Peter’s kind heart, which had been growing softer and softer with every word she spoke, was in melting state.

“Upon my soul,” he declared, “you put quite a new light on it; you do indeed, Miss Pennycuick.  I see your point of view exactly.  But—­”

With the utmost willingness to meet her views, he was unable to see how to do it.  It was easy to say “Let him off the chain,” but the mater, who was very particular, would never stand a dog muddying the verandahs and digging holes for his bones in the flower-beds.  He, Mr Peter, was an only son, and she would do most things for him, but he was afraid she would draw the line at that.