The car came down the driveway and circled the house to the side farthest from Dugan. There, at the front door, it halted. The Mistress and Lad got out. The Master did not go down to the garage. Instead, he circled the house again; and chugged off up the drive; bound for the station to meet a guest whose train was due in another ten minutes. Dugan drew a long breath; and swaggered toward the garage. His walk and manner had in them an easy openness that no honest man's could possibly have acquired in a lifetime. The Mistress, deposited at the front veranda, chirped to Lad; and started across the lawn toward the chrysanthemum bed, a hundred feet away. The summer's flowers were gone--even to the latest thin stemmed Teplitz rose and the last stalk of rose-tinted cosmos. For dining table, now, and for living-room and guest rooms, nothing was left but the mauve and bronze hardy chrysanthemums which made gay the flower border at the crest of the lawn overlooking the lake. Thither fared the Mistress, in search of blossoms. Between her and the chrysanthemum border was a bed of canvas. Frost had smitten the tall, dark stems; leaving only a copse of brown stalks. Out of this copse, chewing greedily at an uprooted bunch of canna-bulbs, slouched Romaine's wandering sow. At, sight of the Mistress, she paused in her leisurely progress and, with the bunch of bulbs still hanging from one corner of her shark-mouth, stood blinking truculently at the astonished woman. Now, Lad had not obeyed the Mistress's soft chirp. It had not reached his dulling ears;--the ears which, of old, had caught her faintest whisper. Yet, he would have followed her, as ever, without such summons, had not his nostrils suddenly become aware of an alien scent. Lad's sense of smell, like his hearing, was far less keen than once it had been. But, it was still strong enough to register the trace of intruders. His hackles bristled. Up went the classically splendid head, to sniff the light breeze, for further information as to the reek of pig and the lighter but more disquieting scent of man. Turning his head, to reinforce with his near-sighted eyes the failing evidence of his nostrils, he saw the sow emerge from the canna-clump. He saw, too--or he divined--the look in her pale little red-rimmed eyes; as they glared defiantly at the Mistress. And Lad cleared the porch steps at one long leap. For the instant, he forgot he was aged and stout and that his joints ached at any sudden motion; and that his wind and his heart were not what they had been;--and that his once-terrible fangs were yellowed and blunt; and that his primal strength was forever fled. Peril was facing the Mistress. That was all Laddie knew or cared. With his wonted trumpet-bark of challenge, he sped toward her.