It was the first time since his marriage that Coverdale had dined by himself, and he felt proportionably lonely; everything tended to remind him of Alice--her favourite dog, a little black-and-tan spaniel, with large loving eyes, not unlike her own, leaped on his knee after dinner, and gazing wistfully at the empty chair opposite, uttered a low whine, as though it would inquire, “Where’s my mistress?” The footstool, whereon her dainty little feet were wont to repose--the screen with which she was accustomed to shade her fair cheek from the too ardent advances of the fire--each object, animate or inanimate, recalled his thoughts to Alice; and feeling, even more strongly than he had ever yet felt, how deeply and tenderly he loved her, he for the first time perceived that love in its true light, and, in acknowledging its full reality, became conscious of the duties and responsibilities such an affection entailed upon him. Faintly and dimly at first the light broke in upon him; deeply did he feel the difficulties of the task, and his own inability to perform it; and bitterly, most bitterly, did he regret his own selfish carelessness, which had, as he was fain to confess, tended already to estrange his young wife’s affection, and to convert a gentle, yielding girl, into a wilful and exacting woman. And thus he sat, pondering over and regretting the past, and forming wise and good resolutions for the future, while minutes gliding by unobserved grew into hours, until the sudden restlessness of the little dog, which had been sleeping quietly upon his knees, roused him, and looking at his watch, he perceived it was nearly midnight. As he did so the dog, whose restlessness appeared to increase, uttered a short bark, while at the same moment a distant sound was faintly audible, which Harry’s practised ear instantly recognised as the report of a gun. To spring to the window, open the shutter, and fling up the sash, was the work of an instant; a like space of time sufficed to resolve doubt into certainty,--guns were being discharged in a favourite plantation about half a mile from the house--a plantation in which the pheasants were as well fed and tame as barn-door fowls; it was evident the poachers were taking their revenge, and that these sacred birds, the Lares and Penates of Harry’s sporting mythology, were being ruthlessly slaughtered on their roosts. Harry rang the bell furiously; then, before the alarmed Wilkins (who, having commenced his career in the service of an apoplectic alderman, laboured under a chronic impression that somebody was in a fit) had passed beyond the door of the servants’ hall, he rushed impetuously out of the dining-room, and meeting that bewildered domestic in full career, nearly frightened him into an attack of the malady he so much dreaded for others, by exclaiming, “Here, quick! Tell Saunders, or some of them, to saddle the shooting cob, and bring him round instantly; then find me a hat and pea-jacket. Quick, I say!”