Here Excalibur would lie down, with the contented sigh of a tired child, and go to sleep. As he almost invariably lay down between the hole and the ball, the players agreed to regard him as a bunker. Eileen putted round him; but the curate--who had little regard for the humbler works of creation, Excalibur thought--used to take his mashie and attempt a lofting shot, an enterprise in which he almost invariably failed, to Excalibur's great inconvenience. Country walks were more tolerable, for Eileen's supervision of his movements, which was usually marked by an officious severity, was sensibly relaxed on these days and Excalibur found himself at liberty to range abroad amid the heath and through the coppices, engaged in a pastime that he imagined was hunting. One hot afternoon, wandering into a clearing, he encountered a hare. The hare, which was suffering from extreme panic, owing to a terrifying noise behind it,--the blast of the newest and most vulgar motor horn, to be precise,--was bolting right across the clearing. After the manner of hares where objects directly in front of them are concerned, the fugitive entirely failed to perceive Excalibur and, indeed, ran right underneath him on its way to cover. Excalibur was so unstrung by this adventure that he ran back to where he had left Eileen and the curate. They were sitting side by side on the grass and the curate was holding Eileen's hand. Excalibur advanced on them thankfully and indicated by an ingratiating smile that a friendly remark or other recognition of his presence would be gratefully received; but neither took the slightest notice of him. They continued to gaze straight before them in a mournful and abstracted fashion. They looked not so much at Excalibur as through him. First the hare, then Eileen and the curate! Excalibur began to fear that he had become invisible, or at least transparent. Greatly agitated he drifted away into a neighboring plantation full of young pheasants. Here he encountered a keeper, who was able to dissipate his gloomy suspicions for him without any difficulty whatsoever. But Eileen and the curate sat on. "A hundred pounds a year!" repeated the curate. "A pass degree and no influence! I can't preach and I have no money of my own. Dearest, I ought never to have told you." "Told me what?" inquired Eileen softly. She knew quite well; but she was a woman, and a woman can never let well enough alone. The curate, turning to Eileen, delivered himself of a statement of three words. Eileen's reply was a softly whispered _Tu quoque!_ "It had to happen, dear," she added cheerfully, for she did not share the curate's burden of responsibility in the matter. "If you had not told me we should have been miserable separately. Now that you have told me, we can be miserable together. And when two people who--who--" She hesitated. The curate supplied the relative sentence. Eileen nodded her head in acknowledgment.