He was further urged to this decision by the fact that his house was now properly served, and that since that night of his furniture’s arrival, there had been no evidence but that Mr. Breeds’s unhonoured guests had withdrawn finally from the neighbourhood. Dennis he would leave in general charge, with strict orders as to the protection of the premises during his absence. So matters were ordered; and about the second week in January the party set forth. The baronet and his sister posted; but their neighbour, to whom a saddle was the most _sans souci_ of conveyances, rode his own horse. The weather was bitterly cold, with a perpetual menacing look in all the stony vault of the sky, and the journey, till near its termination, quite uneventful. They did not start by way of Stockbridge; but, to Mr. Tuke’s relief, took cross-tracks for a number of miles, and struck the London road at Basinstoke, where they dined. He rode at their wheel, or not, as circumstance permitted, and Angela was gracious or peevish with him according to her mood. Perhaps his own varied. After dinner his heart would sing jocundly: “She unites sense with beauty, and hath a hundred charms of wit and winsomeness. I am a fool to doubt.” Then he would murmur: “Am I frighted by the shadow of my own past? I will carry her in the teeth of it all. None but the brave deserve the fair.” And so presently to the reaction--the fall of enthusiasm’s temperature in the chill of some icy response when digestion needed a stimulus. “None but the brave deserve immunity from the fair,” thought he. “These old saws want mending.” And maybe he was right; for even an axiom will not endure for ever, but will wear out like a book-block, and come to leave a faint impression. They slept at the “White Hart” at Hook--whither an outrider had preceded them to bespeak beds--and were to make an end of their journey by the evening of the morrow. On that following day all went awry. The little baronet had been free with his bottle overnight, and was, for him, in a very sour and cross-grained condition. The water they had found frozen in the ewers; the soap curdled--as it will in very cold weather--in the dishes. The chimney had, and the venison had been, smoked. The waiters received vails proportionate with the mood of the party, and showed some consequent surliness in bidding it on its way. For half the morning Mr. Tuke jogged in the rear of the chaise, cursing the ice-bound road and the ringing cold. Angela sat amongst her furs pink-eyed, like a ferret looking out of straw; and Sir David nursed his sick head, and exclaimed spasmodically over the infernal jolting; for the sludgy track--some eighteen inches deep in mud during the most of the winter--that was the Exeter road, was now petrified into furrows like those in a bed of larva.