‘Read that,’ he said. ‘The Rusher signs his abdication—gives up the hounds, moves his horses—or what he is pleased to call his—I think I know who has paid for them and their keep for a good dozen years now—and hunts in Leicestershire this winter. My father must not, of course, be worried, so her Magnificence forwards the letter to me. Really, it strikes me as rather pathetic, Brownlow. How are the mighty fallen! But, pathetic or not, the hounds must be hunted this season or the mouth of our enemy—Bramhall, to wit—will be altogether too extensively enlarged over us.—Oh! well, if it comes to that, I suppose I can hunt them well enough myself, with Warcop’s help, putting in a day every fortnight or so from Cambridge during term time. I’ll back myself to be a popular master before the end of the winter, though there will be prejudices to live down, no doubt. Gad! so much the better—_carrière ouverte aux talents_. After all, I can canoodle and coax against most people, you know, and be nine foot high, too, when I like.’ Which was perfectly true. Had I not experience thereof? I fell in with this idea the more readily since our English institution of fox-hunting plays so large a part in country life, bringing landlord and tenant together on equal terms, and establishing a friendly and wholesome relation invaluable as between class and class. Mastership of the Hover, though infringing somewhat upon the routine of his college work, was in my opinion calculated to prove an excellent introduction to those larger and immensely more important forms of mastership which, for Hartover, seemed to loom up by no means far ahead. But creaking gates hang long, the proverb says. And this proved true of the invalid at Bath. The months passed, and yet Lord Longmoor, though increasingly fanciful, increasingly querulous, increasingly a sick man, in truth, still kept a feeble hold of life through autumn, winter, spring, and on into the golden heats of midsummer. The May term again drew to its close, and with it Hartover’s sojourn at Cambridge. How had the university affected and influenced him? Chiefly, I believed, as a pause, a place of recovery before further effort. Out of the great world he had come, surfeited by all too heavy a meal—for one of his age—of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Back into the great world, it was ordained, he must return. But he had rested by the way, had slept off the effects, so to speak, of that over-much and evil fruit-eating, had at once steadied and grown younger.