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Updated: June 15, 2025
It was an interesting picture for the Nuthill folk and Colonel Forde to see Finn and Desdemona sedately strolling across the lawn together, tried friends and mates, divided sometimes by the impudent gambols and even by the mock attacks and invitations to play of their own lusty son the only whelp in existence, probably the only one who ever had lived, to carry in his veins in equal parts the blood of centuries of Irish wolfhound and bloodhound champions.
The savor of that life would remain for ever in his nostrils, no matter how ordered and humanized his days at Nuthill; just as consciousness of human cruelty and the torture of imprisonment had been burned into his memory and nature, indelibly as though branded there by the hot irons of the circus folk in New South Wales.
Meantime, you could not have found a more placidly happy and contented hound in England than the Lady Desdemona; and there were very few days on which she did not meet Finn, either at Nuthill or at Shaws. The beautiful early summer weeks slid by, and the young bloodhound grew more sedate and less given to violent exercise.
If Finn had been human, he would have shrugged his shoulders, and in private given vent to generalizations regarding the inscrutability of females. As it was, he very likely shrugged his great gray shoulders, but went his way without remark. Then came the day upon which Desdemona disappeared from Shaws, and Finn, to the Master's surprise, slept in his own proper bed at Nuthill.
But his fears were groundless, thanks to Jan's few weeks of discipline and training before leaving Nuthill. "Come in here in here Jan, boy. Don't touch him. Come in here!" Jan stood for one moment, listening, his hackles bristling resentment of the terrier's insolence. And then he walked obediently to Dick's side, the snarling, yapping terrier literally pendent from his neck.
And Jan did have at least one useful lesson in the week following Betty's accident on the Downs; and it was a lesson which he never entirely forgot. Jan was busily doing nothing in particular "mucking about" as the school-boys elegantly put it in the little lane which forms a right-of-way across the Downs, between the Nuthill orchard and the westernmost of the Upcroft fields.
At all events, once the thing was decided, nobody concerned doubted for a moment the fitness of it. Betty's own arrangements may have had something to do with it. For the Master and the Mistress had set their hearts upon Betty having a season in London and a month or two on the Continent, in part with her Nuthill friends, and, for a portion of the time, with another relative.
The circumstances of his birth had all favored the development of alert hardiness; but his translation to the well-ordered Nuthill home had come at a very early stage. The influence of Finn, with his mastery of hunting and knowledge of wild life, formed a constant and most wholesome tonic in Jan's upbringing; a splendid corrective to the smooth comforts of Nuthill life.
The big double doors in the ivy-grown flint wall of this inclosure stood wide open. Humming bees sailed booming to and fro, like ships in a tropical trade-wind. When the Nuthill party looked in through the gates of this delectable pleasaunce they beheld in its midst the Lady Desdemona, gazing solemnly down her long nose at the moving checkers of sunlight on the grass.
Within eighteen or twenty minutes they were a good four miles from Nuthill and nearing the gap in the high ridge through which one looked out over the Sussex weald from Desdemona's cave. In another couple of minutes the Master was on the ground beside Betty, and Punch, with the nonchalance of his kind, was nosing the turf, as though to distract attention from his hard breathing.
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