“Garn!” Tilda chuckled.  “But I’m glad it took you in too.  The foolishness was my overdoin’ it with ’Dolph.  Dogs don’t ’ave any religion, it seems; and it rattled ’em a bit, ‘is be’avin’ like a person that ’ad just found salvation.  The Minister talked some science about it to Mother Tossell—­said as ’ow dogs ’adn’t no souls but a ’eap of sympathy; and it ended by ’er ‘avin’ a good cry over me when she tucked me up for the night, an’ sayin’ as after all I might be a brand plucked from the burnin’.  But it didn’ take in Miss Chrissy, as I could tell from the look in ’er eyes.”

Whatever Miss Chrissy’s doubts may have been, she chose a curious and perhaps a subtle method of expressing them.  After breakfast she took Tilda to her room, and showed her a small volume with a cloth binding printed over with blue forget-me-nots and a gilt title, The Lady’s Vade-Mecum, or How to Shine in Society.  It put forth a preface in which a lady, who signed herself “One of the Upper Ten Thousand” but gave no further clue to her identity, undertook (as she put it) “to steer the aspirant through the shoals and cross-currents which beset novitiate in the haut-ton;” and Miss Chrissy displayed the manual shyly, explaining that she had bought it in Taunton, and in a foolish moment.  “It flies too high for me.  It says, under ‘Cards,’ that no lady who respects herself would talk about the ‘Jack of Spades’; but when I played Fives and Sevens at the last harvest supper but one, and started to call him a Knave, they all made fun of me till I gave it up.”  She opined, nevertheless, that Tilda would find some good reading in it here and there; and Tilda, sharp as a needle, guessed what Miss Chrissy meant—­that a study of it would discourage an aspirant to good society from smiling up at it between her ankles.  She forgave the divined intention of the gift, for the gift itself was precisely what her soul had been craving.  She borrowed it for the day with affected nonchalance—­Tilda never gave herself away—­and hugged the volume in her pocket as she and Arthur Miles and ’Dolph explored the coombe’s downward windings to the sea.

A moor stream ran down the coombe, dodging and twisting between the overlaps of the hills, and ended in a fairy waterfall, over which it sprang some thirty feet to alight on a beach of clean-washed boulders.  Close beside the edge of the fall stood a mud-walled cottage, untenanted and roofless, relic of a time when Farmer Tossell’s father had adventured two or three hundred pounds in the fishery, and kept a man here with two grown sons to look after his nets.  Nettles crowded the doorway, and even sprouted from crevices of the empty window sockets.  Nettles almost breast-high carpeted the kitchen floor to the hearthstone.  Nettles, in fact—­whole regiments of nettles—­had taken possession and defended it.  But Tilda, with the book in her pocket, decided that here was the very spot for