But Horace, in the face of reason and in defiance of his German counsellors, insisted upon letting fly the hawks in this high wind; and it so fell out that, in the first place, all the terms he used in his haste and spleen were wrong; and in the next, that the quarry taking down the wind, the horsemen could not keep up with the hawks: the falconers in great alarm, called to them by the names they gave them--“Miss Didlington,” “Lord Berners.” “Ha! Miss Didlington’s off;--off with Blucher, and Lady Kirby, and Lord Berners, and all of ‘em after her.” Miss Didlington flew fast and far, and further still, till she and all the rest were fairly out of sight--lost, lost, lost! “And as fine a caste of hawks they were as ever came from Germany!”--the falconers were in despair, and Churchill saw that the fault was his; and it looked so like cockney sportsmanship! If Horace had been in a towering rage, it would have been well enough; but he only grew pettish, snappish, waspish: now none of those words ending in _ish_ become a gentleman; ladies always think so, and Lady Cecilia now thought so, and Helen thought so too, and Churchill saw it, and he grew pale instead of red, and that looks ugly in an angry man. But Beauclerc excused him when he was out of hearing; and when others said he had been cross, and crosser than became the giver of a gala, Beauclerc pleaded well for him, that falconry has ever been known to be “an extreme stirrer-up of the passions, being subject to mischances infinite.” However, a cold and hot collation under the trees for some, and under a tent for others, set all to rights for the present. Champagne sparkled, and Horace pledged and was pledged, and all were gay; even the Germans at their own table, after their own fashion, with their Rhenish and their foaming ale, contrived to drown the recollection of the sad adventure of the truant hawks. And when all were refreshed and renewed in mind and body, to the hawking they went again. For now that “The wind was laid, and all their fears asleep,” there was to be a battle between heron and hawk, one of the finest sights that can be in all falconry. “Look! look! Miss Stanley,” cried Granville; “look! follow that high-flown hawk--that black speck in the clouds. Now! now! right over the heron; and now she will _canceleer_--turn on her wing, Miss Stanley, as she comes down, whirl round, and balance herself--_chanceler_. Now! now look! cancelleering gloriously!” But Helen at this instant recollected what Captain Warmsley had said of the fresh-killed pigeon, which the falconer in the nick of time is to lay upon the heron’s back; and now, even as the cancelleering was going on--three times most beautifully, Helen saw only the dove, the white dove, which that black-hearted German held, his great hand round the throat, just raised to wring it. “Oh, Beauclerc, save it, save it!” cried Lady Cecilia and Helen at once.