She noted the hour for Mr Musgrave's walk in Diogenes' company and, though he changed the direction of his walk daily, almost invariably the pertinacious spinster ran him to earth, and, to his intense annoyance, joined him and entreated permission to hold Diogenes' chain.

That was the greatest of the many embarrassments Diogenes occasioned Mr Musgrave. He began unconsciously to look for Miss Simpson's spare figure furtively behind trees and hedges as he proceeded on his way; when it flashed abruptly upon him, appearing unexpectedly round a bend of the road, or starting up, as it seemed to his surprised eyes, out of the very ground, he experienced a desire to loosen Diogenes' chain and set him at her. He was growing to hate the sight of her thin, eager face. And her comparisons of the two dogs, which were one dog, disconcerted him. He came near to taking her into the secret at times.

It puzzled him to think what she would make of it if she learned the truth.

Miss Simpson was so anxious to establish the fact of the marked similarity in their tastes that she blundered into the declaration that she doted on dogs, particularly bull-dogs. Mr Musgrave received this statement coldly.

"I am afraid I cannot sympathise with your enthusiasm," he replied. "I dislike dogs--particularly bull-dogs."

"Then why," asked Miss Simpson very naturally, "do you keep a bull-dog?"

"I am only taking care of it for a friend," he explained.

"How very kind of you," she gushed. "Such a responsibility, other people's pets."

She embarked upon a windy dissertation about a cat she had once taken charge of for some one, and the trouble and expense this ungrateful animal had caused her.

"But you can't chain up a cat," she explained. "People are so selfish.

They never consider how they trespass on one's kindness."

"If service called for no sacrifice it would not be kindness," Mr Musgrave replied sententiously.

"Ah, how true that is!" exclaimed Miss Simpson. "You have such a comprehensive way of putting things. One _ought_ to be kind, of course."

"I think," he replied with emphasis, "if the desire to be kind is lacking, it is just as well to leave it alone."

"Yes," she acquiesced flatly. "That's true, too. But we most of us desire to be kind, don't we?"

"No," he returned in his bluntest manner; he was feeling too annoyed to wish to be civil. "I fancy in the majority of us that desire is a negligible quantity."

"But not in you," she said insinuatingly.

"In me most pronouncedly," he asserted with conviction.

If this quality were not lacking in himself in a general sense he knew at that moment it was most assuredly lacking in relation to her. Mr Musgrave, having been guilty of ungraciousness, was immediately ashamed of his irritation, and during the remainder of the walk he sought to atone for his former discourtesy by a greater amiability than Miss Simpson was accustomed to from him--a mistaken form of kindness which led to the encouragement of all manner of false hopes in Miss Simpson's maiden mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

John Musgrave sat at his solitary breakfast-table and regarded the covered dishes before him with, for the first time within his memory, so little interest in their contents that he felt a strange disinclination to uncover them. This lack of appetite, he decided, resulted either from indisposition or from approaching age. Since he felt no indisposition, he attributed it to the latter cause. Persons of advancing middle-age were less hearty than youth at the beginning of the day. That was only natural. Therefore he did not lift the covers, but made an indifferent breakfast of toast and coffee.

Nevertheless, as the day advanced, he made the further discomfiting discovery that this lack of interest was not confined solely to the table, but spread itself like a blight over the ordinary affairs of life. He was oddly disinclined to follow any of his usual pursuits.

Mr Musgrave was unaccountably bored with everything. He experienced a restlessness foreign to his habitual placidity, which restlessness, by reason of its strangeness, worried him considerably. It was inconceivable that after forty years of tranquil contentment he should develop the quality which of all others he had found so difficult to comprehend or sympathise with. Yet restless he was, and dissatisfied-- dissatisfied, with Moresby and the even tenor of his days. He wanted inexplicably to fling things into a portmanteau and start off for some place--any place that was fairly distant.

He did not, of course, yield to this extraordinary impulse. Being moved by such an impulse was sufficiently amazing; to have obeyed it would have been more amazing, still. He went instead into the garden and freed Diogenes from the chain, and allowed him to exercise unchecked over the flower borders, to the indignant astonishment of Bond, who was preparing the beds for the spring planting.

"Blest if he ain't gone dotty over that there dog," he complained.

And the cat, who was airing herself in the belief that her enemy was confined to the restricted limits of the chain, sought refuge up a tree, and gloomily watched Diogenes as he gambolled below. She had refused to follow Eliza's example and evacuate in the enemy's favour, but her resentment of Diogenes' presence was bitter and prolonged; it declined to soften before Diogenes' persistent overtures towards a greater friendliness. Her disapproval remained closely associated with that first unfortunate meeting, which proved an unforgiving spirit. Diogenes and Mr Musgrave had decided to forget that occasion and were, as a result, firm friends.

When Diogenes was again on the chain, and Mr Musgrave was once more facing the unwanted viands on his table, looking about him round the large empty room--empty that is, in the matter of companionship--he made the biggest and most startling discovery of the lay: he was lonely-- really lonely, as he had not been since the months immediately following his sister's marriage. Why, in the name of mystery, should he, who had not enjoyed companionship in his home since his sister had left it, who had not, save in a vague fashion when she left him solitary after one of her brief return visits, felt the need of companionship, be suddenly gripped with this desolating sense of loneliness? He could not understand it; and it was the more disconcerting on account of his inability to comprehend this obsession which fretted him, and prevented him from settling calmly to the ordinary routine of the lay.

Mr Musgrave lunched sparingly and later set out for the vicarage for a chat with the vicar. He remained for tea, and in the genial society of the Errols forgot his depression to the extent of believing himself cured of the inconvenience. But the depression had lightened merely temporarily under the influence of that cheery little home circle: out again in the open, facing the keen east wind, John Musgrave felt the heaviness of his mood descending upon him once more, and with an odd distaste for his lonely fireside he fetched Diogenes and took him for a long walk.

On returning from this walk Mr Musgrave did an unexampled thing.

Instead of taking Diogenes back to his kennel he led him into the house, into the drawing-room, having removed the chain in the hall and left it hanging there. Diogenes, with the _noblesse oblige_ of good breeding, accepted all this as a matter of course, and, having first made a snuffing tour of inspection round the room, walked to the big skin rug before the fire and lay down. So uncertain was he of the enduring nature of this concession that he did not permit himself to sleep, but lay, winking complacently at the flames, and furtively every now and again blinking at Mr Musgrave. Mr Musgrave seated himself wearily in a chair and stared reflectively at Diogenes.

"I begin to believe," he said half aloud, "that there is considerable companionableness in a dog. I wonder that I never kept a dog."

Diogenes, under the impression that he was being directly addressed, got up and moved nearer to Mr Musgrave and sat on his haunches, looking with his bulging, affectionate eyes into Mr Musgrave's face. The man put out a hand and caressed the big head.

"I daresay you are lonely too," he said. "You miss your mistress, I expect."

The bulging eyes were eloquent.

"I think, Diogenes," Mr Musgrave added, "that you are sufficiently well behaved to be allowed indoors. I--like to see you here."

Diogenes thumped the carpet with his tail, which was tantamount to replying that he liked being there and was very well satisfied to remain.

Mr Musgrave continued caressing the big head and talking fragmentally with his dumb friend, until the booming of the gong warned him of the hour. He rose to go to his room to dress, and, when Diogenes would have accompanied him, pointed to the rug and bade him lie there and wait.

Perplexed, but obedient, Diogenes returned to the fire, and Mr Musgrave left him there, and stepping forth into the hall and closing the door behind him, was surprised to find himself confronted with Martha, Martha hot and red in the face from the exertions of preparing the evening meal, and so manifestly worried that something more than Mr Musgrave's dinner must have been bearing on her mind.

Mr Musgrave halted and regarded her inquiringly, and Martha, with the fear of King's warning relative to the police and the criminal nature of concealing dogs exciting her worst apprehensions, informed him dolefully that some one must have taken Diogenes away.

"I went out to 'is blessed kennel to take him a few bones," she explained, "an' the turn it give me to find the dear hanimal gone--chain an' all, sir."

Mr Musgrave with the utmost gravity pointed to the door at his back.

"Diogenes is in there," he announced. "I forgot his feeding time."

Martha gasped.

"In the _drawing-room_, sir?" she ejaculated.

"I was lonely," Mr Musgrave explained. From force of long habit he treated Martha as a tried and trusted friend. "I find him companionable."

"Lor'!" remarked Martha. She scrutinised her master attentively, the idea that he must be sickening for something suggesting itself to her mind. "Dogs are company, that's certain," she said. "When he's 'ad 'is supper you'd like 'im back in the drawing-room, I suppose, sir?"

"Yes," he answered. "I think he is sufficiently at home now to be allowed to run about as he likes."

Martha took Diogenes to the kitchen and fed him, contemplating him with renewed interest while he gnawed his bones under the table.

"There's something about that hanimal as I don't understand," she mused.

"If that ain't the same dog, though different, as burst in after the cat with the young lady from the 'All, I'll eat my apron. It's the same young lady comes to see 'im, anyway. If it isn't 'er dog what does she come for? And if it is 'er dog what's the master doing with it? It's my belief," she further reflected, wiping the perspiration from her face with the apron she had dedicated to gastronomic purposes, "that the master is courtin' the young lady, or the young lady is courtin' the master, through that blessed dog. Now I wonder," and Martha turned to the stove and went through mysterious manoeuvres with the vessels upon it, "how that will work? Come to my time o' life and his, change--that kind of change--makes for trouble as a rule."

Small wonder that in the disturbed preoccupation of his cook's mind Mr Musgrave's dinner that night suffered in the cooking. But Mr Musgrave was himself too preoccupied to notice this; the business of eating had no interest for him.

He was relieved on returning to the drawing-room to find Diogenes in occupation of the rug once more; and Diogenes, who had the gregarious instinct even more deeply implanted than Mr Musgrave, in whom it was a recent development, welcomed him effusively and finally stretched himself at Mr Musgrave's feet and snorted contentedly, while the master, of the house sat back in his chair and read, and--which did not astonish Diogenes, though it would have amazed anyone intimate with John Musgrave's lifetime habits--violated another rule by smoking a cigar while he read.

The grouping of the man and the dog in the warm, firelit room made a pleasing, homelike picture, so different in effect from the ordinary picture of John Musgrave reading in scholarly solitude by his shaded lamp, without the solace of tobacco even, that it scarcely seemed the same room or the same man seated in the big chair wreathed in ascending clouds of blue smoke spirals.