He entered the nursery abruptly the next day and found her packing her
dolls. When she saw him, she sat down and began to weep hopelessly. He
knew then that his fate was sealed. And when, a year later, he received
her last little scrawl, he was almost glad that she went when she did.
II
The Striding Place
Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse-shooting. To
stand propped against a sod fence while his host's workmen routed up the
birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him
feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and
forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth
the killing. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever
proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his
estates in the South. The amusements of life, he argued, should be
accepted with the same philosophy as its ills.
It had been a bad day. A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it
fairly sprang beneath the feet. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of
their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been
small. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of
a new-minded _debutante_ who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the
verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above
them.
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