“Let her go,” shouted Arthur, and they did, to some purpose, for in a minute they were passing down that hill like a flash of light.  Woods and houses appeared and vanished like the visions of a dream, and the soft air went singing away on either side of them as they clove it, flying downwards at an angle of thirty degrees, and leaving nothing behind them but the sound of Miss Terry’s lamentations.  Soon they neared the bottom, but there was yet a dip—­the deepest of them all, with a sharp turn at the end of it—­to be traversed.

Away went the little connubial sled in front like a pigeon down the wind; away they sped after it like an eagle in pursuit; crack went the little sledge into the corner, and out shot the happy pair; crash went the big sledge into it, and Arthur became conscious of a wild yell, of a green veil fluttering through the air, and of a fall as on to a feather-bed.  Miss Terry’s superior weight had brought her to her mother earth the first, and he, after a higher heavenward flight, had lit upon the top of her.  He picked her up and sat her down against a wall to recover her breath, and then fished Mildred, dirty and bruised, but as usual laughing, out of a gutter; the loving pair had already risen and in an agony of mutual anxiety were rubbing each other’s shins.  And then he started back with a cry, for there before him, surveying the disaster with an air of mingled amusement and benevolence, stood—­Sir John and Lady Bellamy.

Had it been the Prince and Princess of Evil—­if, as is probable, there is a Princess—­Arthur could scarcely have been more astounded.  Somehow he had always in his thoughts regarded Sir John and Lady Bellamy, when he thought about them at all, as possessing indeed individual characters and tendencies, but as completely “adscripti glebae” of the neighbourhood of the Abbey House as that house itself.  He would as soon have expected to see Caresfoot’s Staff re-rooted in the soil of Madeira, as to find them strolling about Funchal.  He rubbed his eyes; perhaps, he thought, he had been knocked silly and was labouring under a hallucination.  No, there was no doubt about it; there they were, just the same as he had seen them at Isleworth, except that if possible Sir John looked even more like a ripe apple than usual, while the sun had browned his wife’s Egyptian face and given her a last finish as a perfect type of Cleopatra.  Nor was the recognition on his side only, for next second his hand was grasped first by Sir John and then by Lady Bellamy.

“When we last met, Mr. Heigham,” said the gentleman, with a benevolent beam, “I think I expressed a wish that we might soon renew our acquaintance, but I little thought under what circumstances our next meeting would take place,” and he pointed to the overturned sledges and the prostrate sledgers.

“You have had a very merciful escape,” chimed in Lady Bellamy, cordially; “with so many hard stones about, affairs might have ended differently.”