‘Gone to ground,’ said a stout farmer on a sweating chestnut. ‘Known ’em do that at this very place before. I reckon us can give up and trot along home. Lost him properly this time, us have.’

But this dark view went unheeded, for in another moment there was a wild cry from a boy on a bicycle.

‘Hi! Mister! Mister! He come out in Parson’s Medder! Go you that way!’

A cart-track led past a farm and there was a scurry of straying fowls. There were no casualties, and, once through the farmyard, the riders came to a shoulder of land that mounted to a sparse little copse. Avoiding this, the pack scrambled under a broken fence and were up and over the shoulder and lost to sight. The Huntsman and the Master put their horses at the fence. Someone dismounted and opened a gate. One or two followed the Master and there was a spill.

Mrs Bradley, whose medical training and social instincts took pride of place over her interest in chasing the fox, dismounted to attend to the damage.

‘It’s all right,’ said the sufferer, wincing under Mrs Bradley’s sternly exploratory hands. ‘Nothing broken. Thought my collarbone had gone, but it hasn’t – this time. Lucky the falling is soft. I was a fool to attempt the fence on a hireling and on an uphill slant like that. You shouldn’t have stopped. Look, please don’t trouble any further. I’m staying at a pub over there, about a couple of miles away. I shall be quite all right.’

Mrs Bradley, having assured herself that the fall, although heavy, had indeed broken no bones, told her nephew to ride on. Then leisurely she looped the reins over her arm, watched her patient and her nephew depart, and led her horse up the hill in the direction which had been taken by the hunt.

At the top of the rise, she could see some woods, more blue than green except for a larch tree here and there, and some hawthorns just breaking into leaf, and between herself and the trees was a grim-looking wall of Cotswold stone, the kind of obstacle which, although it was common enough, had, so far, been avoided by the fox. She led her horse to a stone stile, remounted and then walked him alongside the wall in search of a gate.

She soon found one. It was guarded by a young countryman who opened it for her at once, obligingly pointed out the route the fox had taken, and, wheeling an ancient bicycle from where he had propped it up, passed through the gate behind her, shut it carefully, and then mounted his machine and accompanied her, wobbling uncomfortably on the coarse grass. Together she and her bone-rattling escort rode across the next field and towards the woods.