“Tell me more about this idea of the hounds,” said Hugh, dodging behind the island to avoid the raking sweep of Lady Susan’s advance. “What am I to hunt? Hares or foxes or a red herring?” “Foxes, of course,” replied Slaney; “there are any amount of them. Uncle Charles shot two in our wood this autumn.” “Good Lord!” ejaculated Hugh; “where does he expect to go when he dies?” “Where do you think?” answered Slaney, with an effort to be suitably flippant; “if there’s anything in the world that Uncle Charles is more convinced of than another it is that he always has moved in the highest circles, and that he always will.” Hugh laughed in his kindly, indiscriminating way. “By the way,” went on Slaney, following up a connection of ideas, “there’s a curious story in the country now about a fox. Mr. Glasgow wanted gravel for the new railway, and bought a bit of a hillside from old Danny Quin at Cahirdreen. There was a big patch of furze there, and the men said that when the first blast went off a grey fox ran out of it and away into the hills; a sort of fox that no one had ever seen before. They say that there is an old prophecy about the bad luck that is to come when that hill is thrown into Tully Lake, and that is just what is to be done where the line crosses a corner of the lake. They believe that the fox is a witch or a fairy, and that it will bring the bad luck.” “By Jove! that’s rather interesting,” said Hugh, steering Slaney into a chair and subsiding into another beside her; “we’ll have to kill that grey fox.” “The men say he was more a silver colour,” pursued Slaney, “and Mike Driscoll told me ‘he thought he’d never ate another bit, afther he seen the way it legged it up the hill, an’ it lashin’ the tail and makin’ snouts at them like a thing that’d be grinnin’ and laughin’.” Slaney was very successful in her rendering of Mike Driscoll, and Hugh laughed again, his ugly little falsetto laugh, and felt that Slaney was a very good fellow indeed. Lady Susan, doing “Dutch roll,” bore down upon them. “The horrid thing was lying on my feet,” she was exclaiming to Major Bunbury, whose hand she was holding at the full stretch of both their arms. “I never remembered that till this instant,--Hughie,” she called to Captain French as they passed, and grasping at his chair she whirled round and came sitting on his knee--“It really was a most awful dream, darling. I had it last night when you were snoring, and it suddenly came into my head now. I thought some ghastly thing was sitting on my feet, like a dog or something, and then suddenly it turned into a whitey, silvery sort of thing, a kind of Arctic fox, and the horrid thing was smiling and showing all its teeth. My word, I _was_ in a funk. And then it turned out to be only the hot-water bag.” “It’s all tricks, Slaney,” said Hugh, “she heard what we were saying.” He laughed and looked at Slaney, whose curious hazel-green eyes were fixed in consternation on Lady Susan. CHAPTER II