“But it couldn’t have been all humbug. She wouldn’t have shown up in that costume if she hadn’t been really anxious.”
“That costume!” said Cyril. “I’m as sure as that I’m here that every hair of that coil was arranged with an eye to its effect on us.”
“But she came down in a dressing-gown.”
“Yes, but what kind of dressing-gown? When a Scythian lady, and still more a Sarmatian,—and there’s a good deal more of the Sarmatian than the Scythian about our fair friend,—shows up in a dressing-gown, you may be pretty sure that it’s a court-dress rather differently made. Madame knows how to dress her part to the letter.”
Caerleon only grunted in answer to this, and they went on in silence for some time. The path was steep, and Cyril found that climbing took all the breath he had to spare.
“How much farther now to the top?” he asked at last, when they reached a sheltered nook in the hillside where a few pine-trees nestled.
“A good two miles yet,” said Caerleon, looking back on the way they had come.
“Then I give in,” said Cyril, resolutely, sitting down on a rock. “I’m about done, and I shall leave the further chase of this young person to you. Ten to one but she’ll come down some other way when you are gone on to the hut, and I shall get hold of her first and give her a good lecture.”
“Lecture a strange girl?”
“Rather! I shall say, ‘My young friend, to try and thrust your schoolmistress’s views on papa and mamma is not religion, but self-will, and to emphasise them by running off like this is not heroic, but bad-tempered.’”