Frederica would rejoin, with unsparing common-sense.

Unmarried ladies of mature age, have, as a rule, learned not only
fortitude and endurance, but have also mastered the fact that ways are
governed by means. Those processes of erosion, however, to which
reference has been made, were, comparatively speaking, slow in
operation, and there remained always Lady Isabel's twenty thousand
golden sovereigns, as safe and secluded in the hands of trustees (who
had a constitutional disbelief in Irishmen), as if they were twenty
thousand nuns under the rule of a royal abbess.

Therefore did Major Talbot-Lowry, M.F.H., and the Broadwater Vale
Hounds, make a creditable show, brown breeches and last season's pink
coats notwithstanding, at the meet at Coppinger's Court, on December
26th of the year 1897. The weather was grey and silver, with a light
southeast wind and a rising glass. Sunshine was filtering down, as it
were through muslin curtains that might at any moment be withdrawn;
some crocuses and snowdrops had appeared in the grass round the wide
gravel sweep in front of the house; there was a perplexed primrose or
two, deceived by the sun as to the date; the scent of the violets in
the bed under the drawing-room windows, came in delicate whiffs round
the corner of the house. It would have been impossible to believe that
but twenty-four hours ago, Christmas hymns had been shouted, and
Christmas presents presented, had not a group of "Wran-boys" offered
irrefutable testimony that this was indeed the Feast of Stephen.
These, a ragged and tawdry little cluster of mummers, shabby survivors
of mediæval mysteries, were gathered round their ensign holly-bush in
front of the hall-door steps. From the holly-bush swung the corpse of
the wren, and from the throats of the Wran-Boys came the song that
recounts the wicked wren's pursuit and slaughter: