We ran west, we ran north; we skirted grey and sounding bays of the Atlantic; we climbed high among heathery, stone-besprinkled moors; we lunched by the roadside in the lee of a rick of turf, and Anthony, by this time emerging from the condition of Being Good, broke the Thermos, and flashed his birthday electric torch in Minx's face until she very properly bit him, and Philippa slurred over the incident with impartial chocolate, and said it was time to start. The region in which the Chicken Farmers had established themselves suggested the nurture of snipe and sea-gulls rather than chickens. It was an indeterminate patchwork of stony knobs of hill and pockets of bog, among which the road humped and sagged, accepting pessimistically the facts of nature. Hardy, noisy hill-streams scurried beside it, or over it, as seemed good to them; finally a sharp turn, a high horizon of sea, and a steep down-hill grade, ending on the shore of a small, round lake. There was a little pink box of a house on its farther side, with a few bunches of trees round it, and among them a pigmy village of prim wooden huts. "That's the place," said Philippa, who had been there with Lady Derryclare. "And those are the last cry in hen-houses. Now remember, both of you, one of them is a doctor, Scotch, and a theosophist, or something mysterious of that sort; and the pretty one was engaged to a gunner and it was broken off--why, I don't know--drink, I fancy, or mad--so you had better be careful----" "I shall be guarded in my condolences," I said, turning in at the little gate, with the sensation of being forcibly fed. "As far as one can gather," said Andrew, "there remains no topic in heaven or earth that----" "Music and poultry," said Philippa in a breath, as I drew up at the hall door. Andrew rang the bell, and a flock of white ducks hurried up from among the trees and gathered round him with loud cries of welcome. There was no other reply to his summons, and at the second essay the bell-wire came out by the roots with generous completeness. "The ladies is gone to th' oxtion!" cried a voice from among the hen-coops, and the ducks lifted up their voices in ardent reply. "Where is the auction?" Philippa called, when a comparative silence had fallen. "In Harrington's, beyond at the Mines!" replied the oracle, on a well-sustained high G. "Put the cards on the hall table," said Philippa, "we might go back that way."