She sat on the stile and sniffed the spring scents luxuriously, while Sarah and Selina had their hunt. The may, and the wild geranium, and the clover. Heavens, how good it all was! The white road wandered down the hill, but no one came. She had the whole beautiful world to herself. And then a small streak came moving slowly along the centre of the road. Presently it resolved itself into a dog. Tired, sore-footed, by the way it ran, covered with dust, but running steadily. A dog with a purpose. Sarah and Selina, scenting another of their kind, emerged hot foot and giving tongue from the centre of the wood. The dog—Ruth could see now it was a Gordon Setter in haste about his business—slipped through the hole in the hedge, and went, trotting wearily but without pause, across the buttercup field towards the house. To Ruth’s amazement, Sarah and Selina made no attempt to follow. Instead they sat down side by side in front of her and proceeded to explain. Ruth looked at the hole, wondering. “He must have belonged here once, of course,” she said, “I wonder how far he has come, the poor dear.” She hurried up the slope, and reached the house in time to hear Miss McCox’s piercing wail rend the air from the kitchen. “And into every room has he been like greased lightning before I could hinder, and covered with dust and dirt, and me that have enough to do to keep things clean as it is, with those two dirty beasts that Mistress Seer sets such store by. But it’s encouraging such things she is, caring for the brutes that perish more than for Christian men and women with mortal souls——” Red of face, shrewish of tongue, but most excellent as a cook, Miss McCox paused for breath. “She do be wonderful set on animals,” said the slow Sussex voice of the cowman. He settled his folded arms on the kitchen window-sill. A chat about the new mistress of Thorpe never failed in interest. “But ’tis all right so long as we understand one another.” Ruth passed his broad back, politely blind to Miss McCox’s facial efforts to inform him of her appearance in the background. The dog was now coming up the garden path between apple-trees still thickest with blossom. A drooping dejected dog, a dog sick at heart with disappointment, a dog who could not understand. A dusty forlorn thing wholly out of keeping with the jubilant spring world. Ruth called to him, and he came, politely and patiently. “Oh, my dear,” she said. “You have come to look for some one and he is not here, and I cannot help you.” She did what she could. Fetched some water, which he drank eagerly, and food, which he would not look at. She bathed his sore feet and brushed the dust from his silky black and tan coat, until he stood revealed as a singularly beautiful dog. So beautiful that even Miss McCox expressed unwilling admiration.