As, with a docility that I was far from feeling, I followed my wife into the drawing-room at Temple Braney, and surveyed the semicircle of McRorys and unknown notabilities (summarised as "Friends from Dublin") that silently awaited us, I felt that neither freedom nor ease would be my lot. But few things in life are quite as bad as one expects them to be--always excepting sea-sickness. In its dreary circuit of the room, my eye met that of my old friend Miss Bobby Bennett, of the Curranhilty Hunt, niece of its Master, and consultant and referee in all its affairs. My friendship with Miss Bennett was of an ideal nature; when we met, which was seldom, we were delighted to see one another; in the intervals we forgot one another with, I felt sure, an equal completeness. Her social orbit was incalculable; she resembled a fox of whom I heard an earth-stopper say that you "couldn't tell any certain place where he wouldn't puck out." Whether it was at Punchestown, or at a Skebawn Parish tea, or judging cakes and crochet at an Agricultural Show, wherever she appeared it was with the same air of being on top of the situation and of extracting the utmost from it. To me befell the onerous task of taking the Lady of the House in to dinner, but upon my other hand sat Miss Bennett (squired by a Friend from Dublin of apparently negligible quality), and before I had recovered from the soup--a hell-broth of liquid mustard that called itself mulligatawny--I found that to concentrate upon her was no more than was expected of me by both ladies. Mrs. McRory's energies were indeed fully engrossed by the marshalling of a drove of heated females, who hurried stertorously and spasmodically round the table, driven as leaves before the wind by fierce signals from their trainer. Opposite to me sat that daughter of the house whose manicure scissors had terminated the painful episode of the butterfly. I had always maintained that she was the prettiest of the McRorys, and it was evident that Irving, the new District Inspector of R.I.C., who sat beside her, shared my opinion. He was a serious, lanky young man, and at such moments as he found himself deprived of Miss McRory's exclusive attention, he accepted no alternative, and devoted himself austerely to his food. Miss Bennett's intention was, I presently discovered, to hunt with Flurry Knox's hounds on the following day: she had brought over a horse, and it became clear to me that her secondary intention was to return without it. "Larkie McRory's going to take up hunting," she said in her low swift voice. "The new D.I. hunts, you know." Miss Bennett's astute grey eyes rested upon the young lady in question, and returned to me laden with inference.