"At Mrs. Wykeham's. That is eight miles from us. We are on the lake about five miles this side of Helvellyn Towers. You never walked there surely?"
"No, we went in a char-à-banc. But I shall find my way all right."
They parted, and Anstice, with her faithful attendant Hercules, set off homewards. She felt as if her steps had been directed to that lonely little spot in the Fells where a young life was being crushed by the isolation of her environment.
Anstice was a born helper of all the unhappy and helpless. From a child, she had loved anything that was weak or sick, from animals upwards. Her heart was big, and her sympathy unfailing. She mused upon the difference of characters.
"What I was loving so, she was hating," she murmured to herself. "But even I, fond as I am of the still, tranquil solitudes of these valleys amongst the Fells, would get hipped and depressed, if I had to be shut up in them through the long wet winters here, and youth and age living together do not make for congeniality. I must concoct some plans for her welfare."
She was rather tired when she reached home. Brenda exclaimed when she told her where she had been.
"'Tis too far for you, ma'am, 'deed 'tis. And I always think that Ramdale be a terrible gloomy place. I had a nephew who was courting with a farmer's daughter over yon, and he said most o' the folk seemed asleep, and only concerned wi' their own selves."
"That's not uncommon in busy towns, Brenda; we're all apt to get like that."
She made quite a story of her wanderings to the children that evening. Ruffie insisted upon being taken to the window to see the Fells over which she had climbed. And then gazing ecstatically at the purple mountains, he said softly:
"I should like, oh I should like to be lifted up to the top of one. Perhaps when I'm a man I can go in an aeroplane. Dad said I might. I've never, never been higher than the ground by the lake."