“Would it be putting too much delay on your ladyship to send for a tarrier?” said Danny-O, the huntsman, approaching Lady Susan; “there’s one Dinny Hegarty that lives back on the hill here, and they say he have a grand dog.” Lady Susan listened in bewilderment to this request. “Oh, certainly. I don’t know what he wants,” she continued in her strident soprano, to Mr. Glasgow; “I wish Hugh would come and look after his own hounds, _I_ can’t speak Irish.” “I saw Captain French having rather a time with that young horse,” said Mr. Glasgow suavely, “you ought to have a try at him, Lady Susan; a lady will often make a horse go when a man can’t--at least, some ladies can.” Lady Susan cast her dark eyes upon him and laughed. “Oh, I say, that’s what they call blarney over here, isn’t it? We call it humbug in England, you know!” None the less, her opinion of Mr. Glasgow rose, and, so much is there in the manner of saying a stupid thing, he was pleased by the approval and did not notice the stupidity. The emissary to the home of “the grand dog” was already on his way over the hill, speeded by injunctions from his friends to “kick off the owld shoes and be hirrying.” The remainder of the party applied themselves to the agreeable device of damming, at the upper end of the drain, the stream that flowed through it, with the object, as was explained, of “gethering a flood,” which when released, would wash the fox out before it. At intervals a rider or two arrived, hot, wet, and full of explanations of the cause of delay, but of the new Master there was no sign. Slaney Morris was one of these later arrivals. She proffered no excuses, being probably aware that these were made for her by her mount with an eloquence beyond all gainsaying. Slaney had, in an unpretentious way, ridden from her youth up, but she rode merely as a means of transit, very much as people use omnibuses; her enthusiasms were reserved for other pursuits. She was now seated on an elderly brown mare, whose natural _embonpoint_ was emphasized by Uncle Charles’ humane scruples on the subject of clipping horses. As a further tribute to his clemency, the brown mare’s tail had passed undocked through the changing fashions of fifteen years, and hung like a heavy black skirt, in righteous protest against the spruce abbreviations of the French’s Court horses. Mr. Glasgow looked at Slaney, at her old-fashioned habit, at her saddle, horned like the moon, at the mare’s tufted fetlocks and dingy curb-chain, and realized that Miss Morris’s most sincere admirers could not attribute to her the sacred quality of smartness. With Mr. Glasgow, as with most of his countrymen, smartness came next to cleanliness and considerably in advance of godliness. He had often ridden with Slaney, and the points he now uncomfortably noted had merely seemed an unimportant part of the background of a life whose charm depended on culture and not on fashion. He wished that he had not persuaded her to come out.