“I know we shall be dreadfully late,” sighed Claudia.
“I say, you good folks out there, hurry up, please,” cried the gallant Tivett. “It’s getting on for eleven, and this isn’t a picnic-party.”
He was talking to the empty air. A ripple of that elfin laughter from the top of the hill was all that answered him. Sir Hubert, Vansittart, and Major Baddington were all standing round a most melancholy specimen of the genus fly, the very oldest and mouldiest of one-horse landaus, which had broken down hopelessly on the top of the hill.
“We knew that the springs were weak,” said a silver-clear voice out of a swansdown hood. “They’ve been getting weaker and weaker ever since we’ve had anything to do with the fly; but we had no idea the shafts were all wrong.”
“The shafts were right enough when we started, miss,” growled a voice that was half muffled in a red comforter, such a comforter as denotes the rustic fly-man. “It was your weight coming up the hill as did it.”
“My weight!” cried Swansdownhood, lifting herself up on her springy feet like a feminine Mercury. “Do I look such a Daniel Lambert?”
Her hood fell off with that arch toss of the head, and looking at her in the vivid moonlight it seemed to Jack Vansittart as if that jocular exclamation of his had been well founded, and that the woman who stood before him on the crest of the hill, her beauty and her whiteness shining out against the steel-blue sky—“like a finer light in light”—was enchanting enough to have stood for Titania.
She was very tall, but so slim and willowy of form that her height made her no less sylph-like—a queen of sylphs, perhaps, but assuredly of that aerial family. She was dazzlingly fair, and her small head was crowned with a nimbus of pale gold hair, in which there sparkled a galaxy of diamond starlets. Her small nose was tip-tilted, but with a tilt so archly delicate as to be more beautiful than the purest Grecian, or so Vansittart thought, seeing her thus for the first time in the glamour of night and moonshine, and with all the piquancy of the unexpected.
“The horse fell down, and the shafts went crash,” said another young person, who presented to view only a nose and narrow slip of face between the folds of a red plaid shawl, just such a shawl as a well-to-do farmer’s wife might have worn driving to market. “I thought we should all be killed.”
“And so you would have been, if I hadn’t put the brake on sharp, and got down and sat on ’is ’ed,” said the fly-man. “That horse didn’t ought to have been sent out on such roads as this, and if I’d been master he wouldn’t have been.”