CHAPTER XXVI.
"Let none think to fly the danger,
For, soon or late, Love is his own avenger."
Christmas-tide had come round again, and hall, manor-house, and castle
were filling fast. But the pheasants had a jubilee at Kerton, to the
great discouragement of Mallett, who "could not mind such another
breeding season." Foxes were strong and plentiful with the Belvoir and
the Pytchley; and, during two months of open weather, many a
straight-goer had died gallantly in the midst of the wide
pasture-grounds, testifying with his last breath to the generalship of
Goodall and Payne. But the best shot and the hardest rider in
Northamptonshire lingered on still in Paris, wasting his patrimony in
most riotous living, and trying his iron constitution presumptuously.
Lady Catharine sat alone in the gray old house, paler and more care-worn
than ever. I think she would have preferred the noisiest revel that ever
broke her slumbers in the old times to the dead silence that brooded
like a mist in the deserted rooms.
Guy had always been a bad correspondent, and now he hardly ever wrote to
her; but rumors of his wild life reached his mother often, though dimly
and vaguely.
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