Mary clasped her hands delightedly.

‘Dear old Maulevrier!’ she exclaimed, ’you are always good to me.  And now I shall be able to show you the Red Tarn, the highest pool of water in England,’ she said, turning to Hammond.  ’And you will see Windermere winding like a silvery serpent between the hills, and Grasmere shining like a jewel in the depth of the valley, and the sea glittering like a line of white light between the edges of earth and heaven, and the dark Scotch hills like couchant lions far away to the north.’

’That is to say these things are all supposed to be on view from the top of the mountain; but as a peculiar and altogether exceptional state of the atmosphere is essential to their being seen, I need not tell you that they are rarely visible,’ said Maulevrier.  ’You are talking to old mountaineers, Molly.  Hammond has done Cotapaxi and had his little clamber on the equatorial Andes, and I—­well, child, I have done my Righi, and I have always found the boasted panorama enveloped in dense fog.’

‘It won’t be foggy to-day,’ said Mary.  ’Shall we do the whole thing on foot, or shall I order the ponies?’

Mr. Hammond inquired the distance up and down, and being told that it involved only a matter of eight miles, decided upon walking.

‘I’ll walk, and lead your pony,’ he said to Mary, but Mary declared herself quite capable of going on foot, so the ponies were dispensed with as a possible encumbrance.

This was planned and discussed in the garden before breakfast.  Fraeulein was told that Mary was going for a long walk with her brother and Mr. Hammond; a walk which might last over the usual luncheon hour; so Fraeulein was not to wait luncheon.  Mary went to her grandmother’s room to pay her duty visit.  There were no letters for her to write that morning, so she was perfectly free.

The three pedestrians started an hour after breakfast, in light marching order.  The two young men wore their Argyleshire shooting clothes—­homespun knickerbockers and jackets, thick-ribbed hose knitted by Highland lasses in Inverness.  They carried a couple of hunting flasks filled with claret, and a couple of sandwich boxes, and that was all.  Mary wore her substantial tailor-gown of olive tweed, and a little toque to match, with a silver mounted grouse-claw for her only ornament.

It was a delicious morning, the air fresh and sweet, the sun comfortably warm, a little too warm, perhaps, presently, when they had trodden the narrow path by the Tongue Ghyll, and were beginning to wind slowly upwards over rough boulders and last year’s bracken, tough and brown and tangled, towards that rugged wall of earth and stone tufted with rank grasses, which calls itself Dolly Waggon Pike.  Here they all came to a stand-still, and wiped the dews of honest labour from their foreheads; and here Maulevrier flung himself down upon a big boulder, with the soles of his stout shooting boots in running water, and took out his cigar case.