The Master had looked careworn and weary before he called Tara to him. It was a very grey, sad face he showed when he rose gently and bade Finn go into the coach-house and be silent. He had known that Tara's heart was weak, but this thing that had happened he had never anticipated, and the nature and circumstances of Tara's death were such as to move a man deeply. In a sense, her love of the Master had killed this beautiful hound. Her great love had burst her heart in sunder, and so she died, the very noble daughter of an ancient, noble line. [Illustration] CHAPTER X A TRANSITION STAGE To Finn it seemed that life was never the same after the evening of Tara's death. He did not know, of course, that changes had been set afoot during many months before his mother's end came. And in a way he was right; life never was quite the same for him. Active changes, toward which the Master's circumstances had been leading for some time past, began immediately after that strange home-coming which finally separated Finn from his own kin. For instance, the Master seemed generally to be away from the house beside the Downs; and the Mistress of the Kennels seemed always to be busy, and never to be in playful mood. Days passed without even one of those gentle runs behind a bicycle to which Finn had grown accustomed; days during which no one ever spoke to Finn except at meal-times, and the home seemed strangely silent and deserted. Finn was always locked up at night, or he would have chosen that time for hunting expeditions. As it was, however, the long days were his own, and he grew to devote less and less time out of these days to the home life. He was not inclined, as his mother had been, to lie dozing and dreaming for hours together in the outside den. He would slip through the orchard, and over its gate to the open Downs; and there, roaming that country-side for hours at a stretch, he would hunt; only occasionally killing to eat, and for the greater part of his time hunting for the sheer pleasure of it. For so great a hound, he became wonderfully adept and cunning in the pursuit of the small creatures of the open; stalking them as silently, cautiously, and surely as a cat, and acquiring, day by day, more and more of that most distinguishing characteristic of the wild creatures: indomitable patience. Great fleetness and great strength were his by birth; tireless patience and cunning he learned in these lonely days beside the Sussex Downs; and learned them so well that his silent, shadowy great form became a very real terror to all the wild things of that district. There was, of course, no creature among them that could attempt for an instant to meet Finn in open combat; and as time went on, there were few who could successfully pit their cunning and their agility against those of the great hound.