Lancelot was ensconced by the fireplace, roasting slowly, his leg propped on another chair and his expression one of heated misery.
"You may talk of hunting, Darby," said the second Master, bursting in happily; "but we left you to-day, my boy. Whatever took you off up by the ford? We struck the line just where I galloped to, guessing we should, and I clapped them on, and we ran over the big fields."
Mr. Freyne, completely happy, bustled in to enlarge on his success. How he had cast the hounds, and cheered them, despite some absurd blowing of Darby's, up the river, and how they had run on after the fox.
"The fox which Darby had absolutely said was a hare. Over the big fields, running like pigeons, across Clanchy's, up Dhura Hill, fluting, and--er--then"--George Freyne looked inquiringly at his brother-in-law--"my mare refused--and afterwards----"
"They went on to a very large bog," said the General dryly, "and we--Gheena and I--lost them."
Mr. Freyne sat down to enjoy his tea; lost hounds tell no tales, he said importantly; that no doubt they were beaten there.
Darby said slowly that Beauty could never be beaten. She would run the spectral huntsman across a glacier if she got her nose down.
"Then he got in," said George Freyne. "You got them in the road. He got in."
"Or went out in a submarine," suggested Darby; "that bog touches the sea."
Mr. Freyne, ignoring this, repeated accounts of various items of his own dash and skill, of his certainty of its being the line of a fox, and how by his determination he had shown General Brownlow sport.
"But they did not lose him in the bog." Darby limped to the table. "They killed at the verge of the road just as I came up."
"And I brought you the head," said Darby, putting the hare's astounded dead face on a plate before his host. "Daisy had it."
"The only thing to be regretted is that I may never see this hunting again," said General Brownlow, breaking the silence which followed, his eyes on the hare's pate lying close to the strawberry jam.
Christmas at Castle Freyne came in formally about ten o'clock with the advent of the wran boys at the dining-room windows.
Gheena fumed furiously before the sacrifice of tiny feathered things, and was ignored by her stepfather, who supported old customs principally because no one else wished him to. Custom also dictated that everyone's presents should repose on their plates; so that they waited in hunger to slash string and express rapture, and the table was littered with bits of twine and wrapping paper.