The ladies were walking up and down in front of the rows of dead birds, nearly all of which had by now been picked up and laid beside the road where they could be counted and admired. Groups of men, those who had been shooting as well as the beaters and gamekeepers, gathered and dispersed in front of the sacrifice thus displayed. Tom, who needed to know the coast was clear before pursuing his own affairs, shifted from one foot to another, waiting for them to get a move on.

Slowly the shooting brake, drawn by two black horses, was led forward from the shelter of the copse. It was a big black equipage, funereal in aspect – indeed Sir Randolph’s mother, who had died in 1898, being herself ten years younger than the century, had been carried in her coffin to the churchyard by its means – with a raised seat in front and room for six people to sit facing each other behind. The ladies climbed in. There was more delay while politenesses were exchanged about which gentlemen should accompany them. At last, a full complement of passengers being found, they moved off down the drive towards the house, whose chimneys could be seen among the surrounding ornamental trees half a mile or so away.

The game waggon was then quickly loaded, and with its iron upper structure festooned with pairs of birds, hares swinging more heavily behind, it was laboriously turned and set off in the opposite direction towards Home Farm, followed by the smaller cart which carried spare cartridges and was drawn by a stout chestnut cob whose alternative employment was to pull the milk float. These were farm horses and were not stabled at the house. They passed quite close to where Tom was standing, the sound of their heavy feet clear in the still evening, the last light of which touched the polished brass of their headplates and on their heavy collars.

The four or five remaining members of the house party were now walking quite briskly back towards the house, the loaders and dog-handlers following them and about to turn off the main drive towards the back parts of the house, the kennels and gun rooms, while the rest of the beaters and gamekeepers dispersed in the general direction of the village. Tom waited until they were nearly all out of sight, and until the gold of the late afternoon had been succeeded by the soft pinkish-grey of the early dusk before he moved. The mist was now rising much more noticeably from the ground, still low but thickening, beginning to spread a layer of damp haze which in the morning would linger on the lower ground like spilt milk, while the sky above it became the pale clear blue of another late October day. Tom moved quietly round the outskirts of the park, keeping to the trees, until the ground began to slope down towards the thick belt of woodland which bordered the river. Here, at a gate which opened onto one of the wide grassy rides which at intervals had been cut through the wood towards the river and which tomorrow should see the most spectacular of the pheasant shooting, he stopped and fumbled in the capacious pockets of his long jacket. Here, while the men who had been busy all day were going home and Glass’s normally unremitting supervision of his domain would be temporarily relaxed, was the place, with the bitch’s help, to net a rabbit.