“That quite decides me——”
“They may have a room—I am sure I don’t know—but I should advise you not——”
“I should not be in your way at all,” she went on, barefacedly assuming her acquaintance with the remoter causes of his feeble degree of encouragement, and smiling sweetly into his blank face, “in fact, I should be a comfort to you—I mean, I am very quiet, and if I occupy the room, no one else can, don’t you see? I should at any rate serve to keep noisier people out.”
“There is something in that!” he observed, as if to himself.
“So I will go along and see,” she went on, pursuing her advantage.
“My lad can show you a short cut over the river,” was the painter’s unexpected rejoinder. She was not deceived by his mildness. He only wanted to get rid of her, and the moment he had spoken he turned round and resumed his drawing again.
“Delightful, but not quite human,” she thought to herself.
His “lad,” with frank confidence in her power of accommodation to somewhat unusual methods of progression, piloted her across the river by way of a rough bridge of stepping stones, apparently half natural, half artificial, and then led her by many a varied and devious track, through a succession of brambly coppices, and over many stiles of many patterns, tantalizing enough to a town-bred woman. She enjoyed it, however, and was proud of her newly-discovered powers, as she surmounted one unusual impediment after another, and was as quick about it as the long-legged country lad who guided her. Then they crossed a couple of upland pastures where the great, mild-eyed cows were grazing, and half-turning their heads to look at her and Billy Gale, who left her no time to be afraid of them, and at last the slender smoke spirals from the chimneys of a little homestead rose in sight.
“The Heather Bell” was an old-fashioned coaching inn on the outskirts of the great park of Rokeby, and opposite one of its gates. The enormous beech trees leaned over the high Park wall and shadowed the inn that was only separated from it by the width of the road, and whose windows were darkened at noonday by their shade. The inn itself was a large, straggling building, with a low-pitched, tiled roof covered with houseleek. A bushy, garish-coloured garden on the south side, full of flowers, reached to where the fields ended. A woman was standing under the rose-hung porch, shading her eyes with her hand.
“Yon’s the Mistress!” said Billy Gale, suddenly, “and she owes me a skelping, so I think I’ll just mak’ myself skarse!” He bolted, and just in time, for the landlady came striding up the garden path with obviously less zeal for the welcoming of the guest than for Billy Gale’s discomfiture.