Being an emotional person in a spasmodic and egotistical fashion,
he found himself thinking presently of Janet Merryweather, as he had
thought more than once during the wakeful hours of the night. He felt,
somehow, that she had been treated detestably, and he was angry with
his uncle for having left him, as he described it, "in such a deuce of a
hole." "One can't acknowledge the girl, I suppose, though for the matter
of that those tell-tale eyes of hers are not only an acknowledgment, but
a condemnation."

With a low whistle, he brought his gun quickly down from his shoulder as
a partridge, rising with a gentle whir from the red-topped orchard grass
in front of him, skimmed lightly into the golden pathway the sun made
through the mist. At the same instant a shot rang out close beside him,
and the bird dropped at his feet while Archie Revercomb sauntered slowly
across the pasture. A string of partridges and several rabbits hung
from his shoulder, and at his heels a pack of fox-hounds followed with
muzzles held close to the moist ground.

For a minute Gay's angry astonishment left him rooted to the spot.
Accustomed to the rigid game laws of England, and ignorant of the
habits of the country into which he had come, he saw in the act, not the
ancient Virginian acceptance of the bird as the right of the hunter, but
a lawless infringement of his newly acquired sense of possession.

"You confounded rogue!" he exclaimed hotly, "so you're not only shooting
my partridges, but you're actually shooting them before my eyes."

"What's that?" asked Archie, only half understanding the words, "were
you after that bird yourself then?"