'Talk of horses and hounds And the system of kennel, Give me Leicestershire nags And the hounds of old Menyell!'
To Eveline the long day after the early breakfast passed very slowly at the Hall. She was in no anxiety for Sir Paget's speedy return, especially after the cloudy manner of his departure, but there were no other lady visitors there just then, and she and Lucretia Hurdell had not a thought, sympathy, or topic in common, and she sighed in utter weariness of spirit as the October day drew to a close, and the brown and purple shadows of evening began to fall.
She thought how many such empty days as this were before her, as autumn passed into winter, winter into spring, and the joyless summer--joyless at least to her--would come again. Every morning with its hopelessness, every noon with its listlessness, every evening seeming more blank than the one that preceded it. Would she ever more feel bright and merry as at Dundargue, and regain her sweet and playful habits of caressing affection?
She stood in one of the many beautiful Tudor bay windows overlooking the terrace and chase, idly and full of her own thoughts, and curiously enough, to her, the rustle of the ivy on the painted panes, of leaves as they fell from the trees, the stillness of the evening hour, and the cawing of the rooks in the old belfry of the house seemed ominous of coming evil.
Dusk had come on, the trees were taking strange shapes against the sunset sky, a bat circled noiselessly before her, and the silver crescent of the moon came out above a coppice.
A few of these trivial things were, by after events, fixed in her memory, and associated with that calm and almost sultry October evening--the lurid brightness of the sun as he set beyond the black stems of the trees of the chase, the perfume of roses from a majolica jardinière in the bay window, and the angry hum of a great bee entangled among the lace of the curtains.
Suddenly she became aware that a group of men, some on horseback and some on foot, was slowly approaching the house by the avenue. Amid this group were four carrying a burden--a man apparently--on a door, or some such improvised litter.
Then appeared a groom leading a horse by the bridle--the bay hunter with a white star on his forehead!