Madge recognised the voice of Caleb Kersey. She would have liked to speak to him, but it was too late. She supposed, however, that he was on his way to visit Sam Culver, from whom he would learn the cause of Pansy’s disappearance. Caleb was on this quest, as she surmised, and he was going to Ringsford, but not to seek information from the gardener. CHAPTER XLIX.—AT MIDNIGHT. Coutts Hadleigh relished good wine; but he was cautious in his cups, as in everything else. On this evening, however, he ‘drank fair,’ as it is called, with his comrades; and those who were acquainted with his habits noted the fact with increasing curiosity as the evening advanced. This was the fifth annual dinner he had given to ‘his men’ since the captain’s commission had been thrust upon him, and he had on no previous occasion displayed so much hilarity or provided so many cynical anecdotes for the entertainment of the company. His lieutenant and sub.—both proprietors of the land they farmed—concluded that the captain must have made some exceptionally lucky stroke in business recently. Coutts believed he had. The members of the Kingshope Volunteer corps were mostly young farmers and the sons of farmers, who should have possessed the physical proportions which would have specially qualified them for the soldier’s career. But it was surprising to observe how few of them presented these qualifications. When Dick Crawshay first saw them mustered, he exclaimed in loud indignation, his huge form towering over the whole troop: ‘What! is that all our county can show in the way of Volunteers? Why, half a dozen of our old yeomen would scare them into the middle of next week without a tussle! They are more like a set of town scarecrows than country-bred lads.... Ah, this comes ov givin’ the land to people that have money and no muscle, and meddle with things they know nothing about.’ He was right in a certain degree, for these youths were the sons of wealthy merchants who take up farming as a hobby, and leaving the work to hired labourers, are indifferent to losses, and therefore able to pay rents which the working farmer has struggled for a time to compete with, and given up in despair, or emigrated. This was a sore subject with yeoman Dick, and although regularly invited by Coutts to this annual feast, he regularly refused to go—and even kept within his own bounds whenever he knew there was a parade. The prejudice prevented him from learning that a goodly number of these young fellows made up for physical deficiencies by skill as marksmen and efficiency in drill; so that the Kingshope Volunteer corps formed a by no means unsatisfactory body of men for home defence. But had any one dared to hint that even in some respects they might be favourably compared with the old yeomanry, he would have made Dick his foe.