"My dear child, what's this? What's this?" he cried testily. But her only answer was to look at him in agonized terror, and then to moan, "The horror of midday!" Dame Jessamine sat up with a start and rubbing her eyes exclaimed, "Dear me, I believe I was napping. But ... Moonlove! Ambrose! What's happening?" But before Master Ambrose could answer, Moonlove gave three blood-curdling screams, and shrieked out, "Horror! Horror! The tune that never stops! Break the fiddle! Break the fiddle! Oh, Father, quietly, on tiptoe behind him, cut the strings. Cut the strings and let me out, I want the dark." For an instant, she stood quite still, head thrown back, eyes alert and frightened, like a beast at bay. Then, swift as a hare, she tore across the lawn, with glances over her shoulder as if something were pursuing her, and, rushing through the garden gate, vanished from their astonished view. The servants, who till now had kept at a respectful distance, came crowding up, their talk a jumble of such exclamations and statements as "Poor young lady!" "It's a sunstroke, sure as my name's Fishbones!" "Oh, my! it quite gave me the palpitations to hear her shriek!" And the pug yapped with such energy that he nearly burst his mushroom sides, and Dame Jessamine began to have hysterics. For a few seconds Master Ambrose stood bewildered, then, setting his jaw, he pounded across the lawn, with as much speed as was left him by nearly fifty years of very soft living, out at the garden gate, down the lane, and into the High Street. Here he joined the tail of a running crowd that, in obedience to the law that compels man to give chase to a fugitive, was trying hard to catch up with Moonlove. The blood was throbbing violently in Master Ambrose's temples, and his brains seemed congested. All that he was conscious of, on the surface of his mind, was a sense of great irritation against Master Nathaniel Chanticleer for not having had the cobbles on the High Street recently renewed--they were so damnably slippery. But, underneath this surface irritation, a nameless anxiety was buzzing like a hornet. On he pounded at the tail end of the hunt, blowing, puffing, panting, slipping on the cobbles, stumbling across the old bridge that spanned the Dapple. Vaguely, as in delirium, he knew that windows were flung open, heads stuck out, shrill voices enquiring what was the matter, and that from mouth to mouth were bandied the words, "It's little Miss Honeysuckle running away from her papa." But when they reached the town walls and the west gate, they had to call a sudden halt, for a funeral procession, that of a neighbouring farmer, to judge from the appearance of the mourners, was winding its way into the town, bound for the Fields of Grammary, and the pursuers had perforce to stand in respectful silence while it passed, and allow their quarry to disappear down a bend of the high road.