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Updated: May 23, 2025
He took a despairing look into the billiard-room. Antonia was not there. Instead, a tall and fat-cheeked gentleman with a neat moustache, called Mabbey, was practising the spot-stroke. He paused as Shelton entered, and, pouting like a baby, asked in a sleepy voice, "Play me a hundred up?" Shelton shook his head, stammered out his sorrow, and was about to go.
"Very queer fellows, those Foliots," said the Commodore. "There was his father: he 'd always rather talk to any scarecrow he came across than to you or me. Wonder what he'll do with all his horses; I should like that chestnut of his." "You can't tell what a fellow 'll do," said the voice of Mabbey "take to drink or writin' books.
"The next field," said the host, "is pasture. We line up along the hedge, and drive that mustard towards the roots; there ought to be a good few birds." "Shelton rose, and, crouching, stole softly to the gate: "On the twelfth, shootin' in two parties," followed the voice of Mabbey from the distance.
Coming so closely on his meeting with this lady, and on the dream from which he had awakened, this conversation mesmerised the listener behind the hedge. "If he gives up his huntin' and his shootin', I don't see what the deuce he 'll do; he's resigned his clubs; as to his chance of Parliament " said the voice of Mabbey. "Thousand pities," said Sir James; "still, he knew what to expect."
The host was a soldierly and freckled man; an older man sat next him, square-jawed, with an absent-looking eye and sharpened nose; next him, again, there was a bearded person whom they seemed to call the Commodore; in the fourth, to his alarm, Shelton recognised the gentleman called Mabbey.
One morning a week later he was sitting in the smoking-room in the company of the gentleman called Mabbey, who was telling him how many grouse he had deprived of life on August 12 last year, and how many he intended to deprive of life on August 12 this year, when the door was opened, and the butler entered, carrying his head as though it held some fatal secret.
The gentleman called Mabbey, plaintively feeling the places where his moustaches joined his pink and glossy cheeks, asked with an air of some surprise, "What's your general game, then?" "I really don't know," said Shelton. The gentleman called Mabbey chalked his cue, and, moving his round, knock-kneed legs in their tight trousers, took up his position for the stroke.
The eyebrows quivered on the stained-glass man. It had never occurred to him, perhaps, that to stand for Parliament a man must look like it; he examined Shelton with some curiosity. "Ah, well," he said, "now you mention it, perhaps not." His eyes, so carefully ironical, although they differed from the eyes of Mabbey, also seemed to ask of Shelton what sort of a dark horse he was.
The voice of Mabbey said: "He was always a dark horse, Foliot: It 's always the dark horses that get let in for this kind of thing"; and there was a sound as though he licked his lips. "They say," said the voice of the host, "he never gives you back a greeting now. Queer fish; they say that she's devoted to him."
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