A meet is where a hunt gathers before it goes out: the hounds, and the huntsman, and the Master, who is the gentleman whose hounds they are, and the field, which is everybody else on a horse. The Kynaston hounds had met at that cross for sixty years. The cross stood forty yards from the forge gate and about four from the Fleece's door, and on a meet morning the Fleece fed the second horsemen, who bring a gentleman his fresh horse at midday, and the grooms, and anybody else who could get in, and Abigail Tinsley had forty breakfasts to send out of her kitchen by nine.So she had asked him, on the Sunday night, to leave the cat till the kitchen was clear. He had said yes. It was the one word, and he had meant it.The kitchen was clear at eleven. The field was at the cross: thirty horses, and the Park's guests among them, and Sir Digby Kynaston on his big bay in the middle with his hounds round him, and the whole of the Kynaston country sitting about in the sun with nothing to do till the ground gave.And out of the Fleece's door came the Duke of Walsingham, in his green coat, with a fat black cat held against his chest with both arms the way Miss Tinsley had shown him, and walked down through them.He did not go round. There was no round. The lane was the lane and the field was in it, and the huntsman gathered his hounds in at the bay's heels and held them there while thirty riders turned their horses' heads and opened a way down the middle, the way a field opens for a funeral or a fool.Nobody said anything for the first ten yards. Then a young man on a grey near the back, one of the Park's guests, a captain of something, said, not quietly: "Good God, it's true."And the field began to laugh, and the laugh went up the lane ahead of him like a hare.Sir Digby Kynaston turned his bay across the lane, and looked down at the Duke of Walsingham, and at the cat, for some time. He was a slow man, and he liked a horse better than an argument, and he had seen a good deal at that cross."Walsingham," he said. "You're carrying.""I am," said Horatio.