I did not describe Miss Craydocke herself when I gave you the glimpse into her room.  There was not much to describe; and I forgot it in dwelling upon her surroundings and occupations.  In fact, she extended herself into these, and made you take them involuntarily and largely into the account in your apprehension of her.  Some people seem to have given them at the outset a mere germ of personality like this, which must needs widen itself out in like fashion to be felt at all.  Her mosses and minerals, her pressed leaves and flowers, her odds and ends of art and science and prettiness which she gathered about her, her industries and benevolences,—­these were herself.  Out of these she was only a little elderly thread-paper of a woman, of no apparent account among crowds of other people, and with scarcely enough of bodily bulk or presence to take any positive foothold anywhere.

What she might have seemed, in the days when her hair was golden, and her little figure plump, and the very unclassical features rounded and rosy with the bloom and grace of youth, was perhaps another thing; but now, with her undeniable “front,” and cheeks straightened into lines that gave you the idea of her having slept all night upon both of them, and got them into longitudinal wrinkles that all day was never able to wear out; above all, with her curious little nose (that was the exact expression of it), sharply and suddenly thrusting itself among things in general from the middle plane of her face with slight preparatory hint of its intention,—­you would scarcely charge her, upon suspicion, with any embezzlement or making away of charms intrusted to her keeping in the time gone by.

This morning, moreover, she had somehow given herself a scratch upon the tip of this odd, investigating member; and it blushed for its inquisitiveness under a scrap of thin pink adhesive plaster.

Sin Saxon caught sight of her as she came.  “Little Miss Netticoat!” she cried, just under her breath, “with a fresh petticoat, and a red nose!” Then, changing her tone with her quotation,—­

     “’Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,
     Thou’st met me in a luckless hour!’

Thou always dost!  What hast thou gone and got thyself up so for, just as I was almost persuaded to be good?  Now—­can I help that?” And she dropped her folded hands in her lap, exhaled a little sigh of vanquished goodness, and looked round appealingly to her companions.

“It’s only,” said Miss Craydocke, reaching them a trifle out of breath, “this little parcel,—­something I promised to Prissy Hoskins,—­and would you just go round by the Cliff and leave it for me?”

“Oh, I’m afraid of the Cliff!” cried Florrie Arnall.  “Creggin’s horses backed there the other day.  It’s horribly dangerous.”

“It’s three quarters of a mile round,” suggested the driver.

“The ‘little red’ might take it.  They’ll go faster than we, or can, if they try,” said Mattie Shannon.