And now it was the end of July, and the season which should have been glorified by Lady Lesbia’s debut was over and done with.  She had read in the society papers of all the balls, and birthdays, and race meetings, and regattas, and cricket matches, and gowns, and parasols, and bonnets—­what this beauty wore on such an occasion, and how that other beauty looked on another occasion—­and she felt as she read like a spell-bound princess in a fairy tale, mewed up in a battlemented tower, and deprived of her legitimate share in all the pleasures of earth.  She had no patience with Mary—­that wild, unkempt, ungraceful creature, who could be as happy as summer days are long, racing about the hills with her bamboo alpenstock, rioting with a pack of fox-terriers, practising long losers, rowing on the lake, doing all things unbecoming Lady Maulevrier’s granddaughter.

That long rainy day dragged its slow length to a close; and then came fine days, in which Molly and her fox-terriers went wandering over the sunlit hills, skipping and dancing across the mountain streamlets—­gills, as they were called in this particular world—­almost as gaily as the shadows of fleecy cloudlets dancing up yonder in the windy sky.  Molly spent half her days among the hills, stealing off from governess and grandmother and the stately beauty sister, and sometimes hardly being missed by them, so ill did her young exuberance harmonise with their calmer life.

‘One can tell when Mary is at home by a perpetual banging of doors,’ said Lesbia, which was a sisterly exaggeration founded upon fact, for Molly was given to impetuous rushing in and out of rooms when that eager spirit of hers impelled the light lithe body upon some new expedition.  Nor is the society of fox-terriers conducive to repose or stateliness of movement; and Maulevrier’s terriers, although strictly forbidden the house, were for ever breaking bonds and leaping in upon Molly’s retirement at all unreasonable hours.  She and they were enchanted to get away from the beautiful luxurious rooms, and to go roving by hill-side and force, away to Easedale Tarn, to bask for hours on the grassy margin of the deep still water, or to row round and round the mountain lake in a rotten boat.  It was here, or in some kindred spot, that Molly got through most of her reading—­here that she read Shakespeare, Byron, and Shelley, and Wordsworth—­dwelling lingeringly and lovingly upon every line in which that good old man spoke of her native land.  Sometimes she climbed to higher ground, and felt herself ever so much nearer heaven upon the crest of Silver Howe, or upon the rugged stony steep of Dolly Waggon pike, half way up the dark brow of Helvellyn; sometimes she disappeared for hours, and climbed to the summit of the hill, and wandered in perilous pathways on Striding Edge, or by the dark still water of the Red Tarn.  This had been her life ever since she had been old enough to have an independent existence; and the hills and the lakes,