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Updated: June 15, 2025
"I felt sure he must be going to Desdemona," continued Betty. "And " "It really is a wonder we none of us thought of that before," said her aunt. They were all assembled now in a roomy loose box in the Nuthill stables.
Jan was quite sedate again now, but he had fussed about a good deal, upon first arrival at the hollow, in his capacity as guide and messenger. An hour later and Betty was comfortably settled on the big couch beside the hall fire at Nuthill, and very shortly after that Dr. Vaughan was in attendance, so that when tea came to be handed round everybody's mind was at ease again.
During his first few days at Nuthill he had as many as nine meals in the twenty-four hours, and for a week or more after that he had eight. Six daily meals was his allowance for several weeks, and in the later stage of four a day he was kept for months. After the first two days he never had two consecutive meals of the same composition.
And Betty well, it was perfectly clear to Finn that she was somehow part and parcel with the Mistress; and whilst never now effusive to any one, he made it clear at once that he accepted Betty as one of his own little circle of human folk, to be loved and trusted, and never suspected. In the evening the great hound lay extended on the hearthrug of the square, oak-paneled hall at Nuthill.
Then, bright and early on the morning of the fifth day, the Lady Desdemona walked quietly up to the kitchen door at Shaws, followed leisurely by Finn, who, after seeing his mate welcomed with some enthusiasm by the cook and several members of her excited staff, turned about and loped easily away in the direction of Nuthill.
"Six hours 'e's kep' me there, an', bli'me, I'd sooner do six months quod," the weary tramp explained, when the Master had been roused and Finn called off. On the morning of his third day at Nuthill it was that Finn first met the Lady Desdemona.
He tasted some tolerably close confinement during this journey; but he thought each day would bring an end to it; and, meantime, nobody ill-treated him, and, what was more to the point, he had some converse with Dick each day. As the habit of his kind is, he had, of course, parted with Finn and the Nuthill folk without the slightest premonition regarding the duration of their separation.
Their London morning newspaper presented the matter at some length to the Nuthill household and to Dr. Vaughan in Sussex, while Dick and Jim Willis, five or six thousand miles away, were choosing a rifle to have Jan's name inscribed upon it.
And then, two months after that second birthday, Dick Vaughan came home on short furlough, a privilege which, as Captain Will Arnutt wrote to Dr. Vaughan, he had very thoroughly earned. Dick Vaughan's home-coming was something of an event for the district, as well as for Dr. Vaughan and the Upcroft household, and for Betty Murdoch and the Nuthill folk.
The Mistress of the Kennels, on the other hand she still was spoken of as "the Mistress," though at Nuthill there never were any kennels insisted that Finn would know perfectly well that Betty was one of the family; as, of course, he did.
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