The gray waltzed to Ronnie's remounting. Aliette watched him swing to saddle, appraising--as she imagined--only his horsemanship. But now, in her too, zest stirred, a strange new zest not entirely attributable to the chase. Three other riders trotted through the gateway, dispelling illusion. "This way," said the wife of Hector Brunton, K.C. They ambled, side by side, diagonally across rabbit-bitten pasture; ambled, single-file, through a gap in the hedge-rows; struck an uphill bridle-path; and arrived, almost last, at the meet. On the flat strip of grass behind the kennels--the direct road to them zigzags steeply down through Petersfield Woods--Will Oakley, the huntsman, his crab-apple face a trifle less saturnine than usual under its cap-peak, was just getting ready to throw off. Fifteen couple of fairly level hounds desisted from their rolling and watched him eagerly. Colonel Sanders, the M.F.H., a heavy old-fashioned soldier, white-mustached, in a heavy old-fashioned hunting-kit (his special low-crowned bell-toppers were the despair of a certain aristocratic hatter in St. James's Street) had just finished his inevitable pow-wow with the kennelman. Ross Titterton (the whippety ex-sergeant-major came early, bent on a little profitable horse-copery) stood, bridle over arm, by Sir Siegfried Moss, an immaculate scarlet-coated, black-mustached young politician who rode, by horse-show standards, magnificently. The Rev. Adrian, no thruster, was finishing an early cigar to be followed by an early nip from his silver flask. Lady Helen had engaged the whipper-in in a reluctant monosyllabic conversation--Jock Herbert was a shy, moon-faced young man from the North--on the eternal question of scent. The remainder of the field, about sixty in all, stood in equine groups of threes and fours a little away from hounds. Mrs. O'Riordan's dogcart, Sir Siegfried's car and second horseman ("Must hunt in one's own constituency occasionally, even if it is a provincial pack," pronounced that very astute young politician), three flappers and a brace of young men on push-bikes, Mrs. Colonel Sanders and a trio of hard-bitten daughters afoot, a farm hand or two, and the socialist doctor of Key Hatch (who was on a walking-tour with his knapsacked wife and had come quite by accident on this "parasitic sport-crazy gathering of the capitalist class") completes the picture. The M.F.H. greeted Mrs. Brunton, whom he secretly thought an adjectival nice little woman, adjectivally too pretty for that dimmed husband of hers, and gave orders to throw off.