seated by a blazing fire in his study, with Nebbie snoozing at his feet, was sufficiently comfortable to be glad that no ‘parochial’ duties called him forth just immediately from his warm snuggery.  He had felt a little ailing of late—­’the oncoming of age and infirmity,’ he told himself, and he looked slightly more careworn.  The strong restraint he had imposed upon himself since he knew the nature of the scandal started by Lord Roxmouth, and the loyal and strict silence he had maintained on the subject that was nearest and dearest to his own heart, had been very trying to him.  There was no one to whom he could in any way unburden his mind.  Even to his closest friend, Bishop Brent, he had merely written the briefest of letters, informing him that Miss Vancourt had left Abbot’s Manor for a considerable time,—­but no more than this.  He longed passionately for news of Maryllia, but none came.  The only person to whom he sometimes spoke of her, but always guardedly, was Julian Adderley.  Julian had received one or two letters from Cicely Bourne,—­but they were all about her musical studies, and never a word of Maryllia in them.  And Julian was almost as anxious to know what had become of her as Walden himself, the more so as he heard constantly from Marius Longford, who never ceased urging him to try and discover her whereabouts.  Which request proved that, for once.  Lord Roxmouth had been foiled, and that even he with all his various social detectives at work, had lost all trace of her.

On this particular morning of the opening of the hunting season, Walden sat by the fire reading,—­or trying to read.  He was conscious of a great depression,—­a ‘fit of the blues,’ which he attributed partly to the damp, lowering weather.  Idly he turned over the leaves of a first edition of Tennyson’s poems,—­pausing here and there to glance at a favourite lyric or con over a well-remembered verse, when the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction.  Rising, he went instinctively to the window, though from that he could see nothing but his own garden, looking blank enough in its flowerless condition, the only bright speck in it being a robin sitting on a twig hard by, that ruffled its red breast prettily and blinked its trustful eye at him with a friendly air of sympathy and recognition.  He listened attentively for a moment and heard the approaching trot and gallop of horses,—­then suddenly recalling the fact that the hounds were to meet that day at Ittlethwaite Park, he took his hat and went out to see if any of the hunters were passing by.